An Agent-Based Model for the Development of Intelligent Mobile Services

The next generation of mobile services must invisible, convenient, and useful. It requires new techniques to design and develop mobile computing applications, based on user-centred, environment-aware, adaptive behaviour. I propose an alternative technology for the development of intelligent mobile services based on intelligent autonomous agents. I investigate how to use agents for the development of the target applications, focusing on the well-known Belief-Desire-Intention architecture. The research statement is to explore the trade-off between quality of information and resource efficiency. However, I identified a number of shortcomings in the existing BDI-system technologies. For example, current developments move towards support to pro-active systems equipped to provide adaptive behaviour. Nonetheless, extensive support to reactiveness is required to (i) provide quality information and (ii) develop resource aware application. Motivated by these findings, I researched and introduce an extension to the BDI-model aiming at the development of mobile services. It provides the structures to take advantage of events from windows of opportunity to enhance the balance between reactiveness and proactiveness. I investigate how these features contribute to the effectiveness and performance of the developed application. This thesis includes (i) an analysis of related work; (ii) a conceptual model; (iii) a design model, (iv) a proof-of-concept implementation , and (iv) a validation of the proposed through of analysis of simulation results.