Baton: a service manager for better sustaining agent coordination in smart spaces

Smart spaces are open complex computing systems, consisting of a large variety of cooperative smart things. Central to building smart spaces is the support for sophisticated coordination among diverse smart things collaborating to accomplish specified tasks. Multi‐agent systems are often used as the software infrastructures to address the coordination issue in smart spaces. However, since agents in smart spaces are dynamic, resource‐bounded and have complicated service dependencies, current approaches to coordination in multi‐agent systems encounter new challenges when applied in smart spaces. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

The paper presents Baton, a service management system to explicitly resolve the particular issues stemming from smart spaces when coordinating agents. Baton is designed as a complement to coordination approaches in multi‐agent systems with a focus on mechanisms for service discovery, composition, request arbitration and dependency maintenance. Baton is now deployed in our own smart spaces to achieve better agent coordination.

The effectiveness and efficiency of Baton is validated by its practical use in the designed scenario and some evaluation experiments.

An attempt at performing dynamic service composition in Baton is made by using semantic information in future work.

Baton, a service management system to explicitly resolve the particular issues stemming from smart spaces when coordinating agents is presented.