Ubiquitous Computing and Multi-agent Systems: Clarification of the Lexicon

摘要

Ambient computing and Internet of Things have reached a level of maturity and a dynamic activity of research and engineering actors. Their goal is to create interactions between a set of distributed devices in an environment, in order to assist human activities. Multi-agent system is an interesting tool for coordinating devices and services for this purpose, because of its adaptation, autonomy and decentralized specifications. However, it is sometimes difficult to understand and share the same idea when it comes to terms such as "Ubiquitous Computing," "Ambient Computing" or the "Internet of Things." As a result, it can be really difficult to browse the literature through research engines and to make a bibliographical study without missing important papers. That is why we want to address this first problem by means of a glossary proposal, synthesizing and unifying the extensively cited definitions of the lexicon belonging to these domains. Relaying on this terminology clarification, we present the relationship between the multi-agent approach and ubiquitous computing.