Collaborative Agent Tuning: Performance Enhancement on Mobile Devices

Ambient intelligence envisages a world saturated with sensors and other embedded computing technologies, operating transparently, and accessible to all in a seamless and intuitive manner. Intelligent agents of varying capabilities may well form the essential constituent entities around which this vision is realized. However, the practical realization of this vision will severely exacerbate the complexity of existing software solutions, a problem that autonomic computing was originally conceived to address. Thus we can conjecture that the incorporation of autonomic principles into the design of Multi-Agent Systems is indeed a desirable objective. As an illustration of how this may be achieved, a strategy termed Collaborative Agent Tuning is described, which seeks to optimise agent performance on computationally limited devices. A classic mobile computing application is used to illustrate the principles involved.