PANI: Personal Agent for Network Intelligence

Abstract

Current IN services are no longer sufficient to feed the increasingly sophisticated requirements of the customer for feature-rich, multimedia, internet services. The development and deployment of a platform to support these services, their composition into tailored user services, and support for user interaction, were the primary objectives of this last phase of the PANI project. Intelligent Agent technology provides mechanisms to tailor the user’s profiles, rules and services to their requirements, and act on their behalf even when they are not online. Furthermore agent technology enables the development of an open service environment into which new services can enter and leave dynamically without the need for manual integration or development of customised User Interfaces. At the core of the PANI service platform is the Agent Services Layer (ASL), an open, distributed, language and operating system independent Agent Platform developed by Broadcom[1,2]. On this foundation, the goal of flexibility and openness in service delivery is achieved through the Service Definition Meta-Language (SDML) and Service Composition Meta-Language (SCML). SDML allows both event and notification services to advertise their presence and capabilities to the PANI system and therefore enter and leave the service-space with no requirement for changes to the user interface or the user’s Personal Agents. SCML allows the user to compose their individually tailored service(s). Access to and configuration of these services is enabled through dynamic User Interfaces which render themselves according to the characteristics of the available services.