The ACCESS Architecture
From Agent Factory
More information on this project can be found [here].
Contents |
Introduction
The Agents Channelling ContExt Sensitive Services (ACCESS) Architecture is a cohesive framework for the development and deployment of ubiquitous applications. The objective of ACCESS is to bolster the rapid prototyping process of ubiquitous services by providing a common core of functionality that developers extend when building applications.
Overview
The ACCESS Architecture is a framework for the rapid prototyping and deployment of u-commerce applications. It is based upon the idea that many ubiquitous applications include similar features, such as dynamic mapping, reasoning capabilities, and user profiling. Rather than the developer writing this functionality from scratch for every application they build, ACCESS provides the common or generic functionality and supports the developer in building components that can be reused in other ubiquitous applications, thereby reducing development time.
Languages, compilers, and development support tools have been created to aid in the rapid prototyping process, along with abstract agent designs that developers extend with service specific functionality. The abstract designs reduce the workload of the developer by capturing generic functionality. This increases reuse and thereby reduces the development time of an application.
Development Process
In the ACCESS development process, successive versions of an application are developed until the functionality is sufficient. The Language for Agent Based Services (LABS) and the Generic Language for Interface Development (GLIDE) enable the generic service and user interface functionality to be extended with application specific functionality. They ensure that the extensions are structured in such a manner as to promote reuse. GLIDE provides an abstract representation of the GUI; ensuring that its structure will remain consistent across an array of ubiquitous devices. LABS increases information hiding and supports the treatment of services as high-level design abstractions.
Architecture
The diagram below illustrates the primary components of the ACCESS Architecture. These components provide support for reasoning (Agent Factory/AFME), map generation/caching, user profiling, resource management, and service delivery. They also include the tools (compilers, debuggers, etc.) used in the development process.
International Award
ACCESS was the winner of the 'CIA System Innovation Award' at Cooperative Information Agents (CIA), which was held in Helsinki, Finland in 2003. The nomination for the award was given on the basis of a vote by the programme committee for the contributions of the paper 'ACCESS: An Agent Architecture for Ubiquitous Service Delivery', C. Muldoon, G. M. P. O Hare, D. Phelan, R. Strahan, and R. W. Collier. To win the award, an oral presentation and demonstration of the software had to be given. The final decision as to the winner was decided by the voting of the programme committee, sponsor, organisational board, as well as a public voting by participants of the demonstration of the finalist systems.
Selected Publications
- Strahan, R., O' Hare, G.M.P., Phelan, D., Muldoon, C., Collier,R., ACCESS: An Agent based Architecture for the Rapid Prototyping of Location Aware Services Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS 2005), Emory University Atlanta, USA May 22-25, 2005 pdf
- G.M.P. O' Hare, C. Muldoon, D. Phelan, R. Strahan, R. Collier, "ACCESS: An Agent-based Membrane for the Rapid Deployment of Context Sensitive Services", Proceedings of The Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems(AAMAS04), New York, July 2004 pdf.
- Phelan, D., Strahan R., Collier, R., Muldoon, C., O'Hare, G.M.P., Sos: Accomodation on the fly with ACCESS, Proceedings of the 13th International FLorida Artificial Intelligence Research Symposium Conference (FLAIRS 2004), Miami Beech, Florida, May 17-19, 2004 pdf.
- C. Muldoon, G.M.P. O' Hare, D. Phelan, R. Strahan, R.W. Collier, "ACCESS: An Agent Architecture for Ubiquitous Service Delivery", Proceedings Seventh International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents (CIA), volume 2782 of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI), Helsinki, August 2003 pdf.
