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Describing and Evaluating Assistance Using APDL

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Smart Modeling and Simulation for Complex Systems

Part of the book series: Studies in Computational Intelligence ((SCI,volume 564))

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Abstract

We introduce an approach to test and evaluate assistance systems for smart environments. Our work comprises a specification language to describe assistance problems independent of the concrete application domain and a test system to test assistance systems and compare their performance systematically. For the latter, our test system employs software-in-the-loop simulation to test assistance systems in a virtual environment instead of a real deployment. On the one hand, this helps developers of assistance systems to evaluate their implementations and compare them to other systems. On the other hand, the language allows researchers specifying assistance problems at an abstract level. Furthermore, we provide a formal semantics for our language, describe the usage of our test system, and show its applicability using a simple assistance system.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    EvAAL competition homepage: http://evaal.aaloa.org

  2. 2.

    IPC homepage: http://ipc.icaps-conference.org

  3. 3.

    In the simulation, a smart environment is represented by a model: the simulation model.

  4. 4.

    Moving a lamp is just an abstract concept. Assume the lamps are spot lights, where the target spot (or: angles between the lamp and the floor) can be set freely by an AS. We also abstract from any form of projection or distortion resulting in non/circular spot lights.

  5. 5.

    Handling invalid actions is beyond the scope here.

  6. 6.

    This situation can of course change significantly when the domain and reward function changes. For instance when imposing a penalty on moving lamps, the maximising AS would get a much lower score and would most likely be outperformed by the minimal distance AS.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the research training group GRK 1424 MuSAMA (Multimodal Smart Appliance Ensembles for Mobile Applications).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Rostock, Rostock, Germany

    Martin Nyolt, Alexander Steiniger, Sebastian Bader & Thomas Kirste

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  1. Martin Nyolt
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  2. Alexander Steiniger
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  3. Sebastian Bader
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  4. Thomas Kirste
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Correspondence to Martin Nyolt .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

    Quan Bai

  2. University of Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia

    Fenghui Ren

  3. School of Computer Science and Software, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia

    Minjie Zhang

  4. Nagoya Institute of Technology, Nagoya, Japan

    Takayuki Ito

  5. Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, China

    Xijin Tang

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Nyolt, M., Steiniger, A., Bader, S., Kirste, T. (2015). Describing and Evaluating Assistance Using APDL. In: Bai, Q., Ren, F., Zhang, M., Ito, T., Tang, X. (eds) Smart Modeling and Simulation for Complex Systems. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 564. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-55209-3_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-55209-3_5

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  • Online ISBN: 978-4-431-55209-3

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