Mobile Intelligence

15.1 INTRODUCTION

Among the current trends in personal communication, there is a growing need of communication services tailored to the user's specific needs and preferences. With devices that enable mobile communication becoming more popular, there is an increasing necessity for the users to control and customize their services, making them sensitive to the context in which the communication takes place and influencing the user's availability and reachability for communication.

The literature distinguishes between context-free and context-aware communication systems [1]. Context-aware services take advantage of knowledge of real-time context regarding the purpose or the circumstances of an incoming or outgoing call. However, most of today's telephony communication services are context free, in the sense that they do not have such knowledge. Context-aware services can be of course much richer and allow the user to manage the use of his communications systems in terms of policies, taking into consideration context information.

Clearly, context-aware systems require much richer architectures than conventional systems. They also require high-level concepts and languages for programming user policies and services. Much work is being done in this area, some of it proposing agent-oriented architectures. This chapter presents the results of a study toward an implementation of a Belief Desire Intention (BDI) agent architecture for context-aware communications systems. AgentSpeak(L), an ...