Simulation of human behaviours for the validation of Ambient Intelligence services: A methodological approach

Abstract

An Ambient Intelligence (AmI) system is a pervasive system in which services have some intelligence in order to smoothly interact with users immersed in the environment. Users are the main entity in AmI systems. Thus, the services are user-centred with an adaptive interaction that provides users with more personalized facilities in a non-intrusive way. The deployment of AmI services is a hard task, especially when the system includes complex users' behaviours or complex deployments in terms of the devices and software participating at the system. Since one of the intrinsic requirements in these services is smooth interaction with users, the user, or at least a model of the user, should be incorporated in the development process. This makes the process of verification and validation of such services quite difficult. This paper proposes the use of Agent Based Social Simulation for a quick and feasible validation of AmI systems. Simulation in the first stages enables easy validation of the services before real environment deployment. The main challenge in this approach is how to simulate humans with realistic behaviours. In this paper, Social Simulation (SS) is used to tackle this problem. Specifically, this paper presents a methodology for the validation of AmI systems by SS. The realistic modelling of users and its validation are key elements of this process and involve challenges that the techniques proposed here are able to deal with. A real application example which shows the level of reality reached in the users' models and the benefits of the methodology is presented in this paper.