MobiGoal: Flexible Achievement of Personal Goals for Mobile Users

Abstract

Users increasingly depend on mobile applications to get access to software services, social networks, and physical devices. When using mobile applications, users often want to achieve personal goals rather than merely perform individual tasks. To achieve a goal, a user often needs to combine software services, social cooperation, and possibly manual work. Moreover, a goal can often be achieved in different ways, each of which involves an alternative sequence of tasks. Accordingly, mobile applications should be customizable, to accommodate user preferences, and adaptive in changing their configuration automatically if the current configuration is failing. In this paper, we propose an improved runtime goal model that can manage runtime lifecycle of goals and adaptively schedule the activation of goals and execution of tasks. Based on the model, we propose an agent-based framework called MobiGoal, which combines software services, social cooperation, and manual work for achieving user goals and provides an infrastructure for developing customizable and adaptive mobile applications for personal goals. We have developed an implementation for Android platform and conducted an empirical study. The results show that MobiGoal applications can effectively support users to adaptively achieve their goals and MobiGoal can significantly save effort of application development for specific goals.