CONSORTS

We have been developing CONSORTS (Coordination System of Realworld Transaction Service) , a multiagent architecture for coordinating various kinds of services in ubiquitous computing. The services realized by CONSORTS include 1) ¡Èsituation¡É based personal supports and 2) ¡Èmass¡É user supports that exploit macro-attributes of mass users. For the "situation" based personal supports, we implement various services that support users' daily activities, such as looking at paintings in museums, working in offices, driving a car in unknown areas, and so on.

For example, ¡Èinformation assist services in a museum¡É include real-time navigation services, proactive guide services for the exhibitions, Internet search services to get the detailed information of the exhibitions that the user is interested in, etc. The services provided to each user are determined by the user's "situation," that consist of the user's profiles (age, sex, occupation, etc.), the user's preferences derived from the user's behavior, and physical information of the user and the exhibitions.

For the ¡Èmass¡É user supports, we implement the services that assist the user in achieving social coordination among users in order to increase the utility provided to both individuals and the whole system. For example, ¡Ècooperative car navigation¡É services, which we have proposed, realize to increase the utility of road transportation systems by reducing traffic congestion for the benefit of both individuals and society as a whole.

For another example, ¡Èpedestrian flow analysis¡É services give advice to a user, such as a manager of a museum, in order to assist in effectively controlling the visitor flow by optimizing the configuration of exhibitions base on the results of simulation and data mining of the flow recorded by sensor devices, such as RFID.

CONSORTS is used in field experiments of the situation-based personal supports, and the analysis and simulation of visitor flow in ¡ÈGlobal House,¡É an exhibition hall, in EXPO 2005 AICHI, Japan (http://www.expo2005.or.jp/).