Ambient intelligence: Towards smart appliance ensembles

The vision of Ambient Intelligence is based on the ubiquity of information technology, the presence of computation, communication, and sensorial capabilities in an unlimited abundance of everyday appliances and environments. Today s experimental smart environments are carefully designed by hand, but future ambient intelligent infrastructures must be able to configure themselves from the available components in order to be effective in the real world. We argue that enabling an ensemble of devices to spontaneously act and cooperate coherently requires software technologies that support self-organization. We discuss the central issues pertaining to the self-organization of interactive appliance ensembles and outline potential solution paradigms: Goal-based interaction and distributed event processing pipelines. This work has been partially supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research under the grant signature BMB-F No. FKZ 01 ISC 27A.