Smart places: Multi-agent based smart mobile virtual community management system

Abstract

Now-a-days advances in mobile device technology aim to build complex computational systems providing a maximum level of flexibility, decentralization, simplest form of interactivity, and ease of use. Recently, the launch of the agent-oriented platform JaCaMo and its Android client based platform JaCa-Android have provided an appropriate level of abstraction to build smart mobile client server systems providing these attributes. By using these platforms, we have developed a multi-agent based Smart Mobile Virtual Community Management System (SMVCMS) that makes it possible to provide a decentralized and open management of virtual communities. This paper addresses the design and architecture of our multi-agent server and client application. It elaborates different features of our system; such as how a participant in virtual communities is supported by a Jason agent that encapsulates the logic and the control of the participation in a virtual community (such as publishing posts, notifying members, making recommendations for the user, etc.). It also discusses how the set of CArtAgOartifacts provides the basic functionalities and operations giving access to the functionalities for knowledge exchange in virtual communities, and personal agents onAndroid exploit these artifacts to execute their tasks while achieving their individual and collective goals. We have employed SMVCMS in the context of Smart Cities and found that the system fulfills the desired goals, such as decentralization of community management, personalized automatic management and discovery of communities, autonomy of agents and flexibility so that any agent can create its own community with the maximum level of ease.