Software solutions for self-organizing multimedia-appliances

The vision of Ambient Intelligence is based on the ubiquity of information technology, the presence of computation, communication, and sensorial capabilities in an unlimited abundance of everyday appliances and environments. But enabling an ensemble of devices to spontaneously act and cooperate coherently requires software technologies that support self-organization. We discuss the salient properties of such a software infrastructure and propose a solution to these challenges, the "SodaPop" middleware. SodaPop uses a two-stage approach to structuring multi-agent systems and provides unique facilities for coordinating the activities of competing agents. Furthermore we describe the application of SodaPop to realize a smart conference room. Here we introduce a principle component topology dynamically extensible with new devices. The articles ends with the description of some resolution strategies and the description of an application programmers interface, that is available from our project site. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.