As wireless communication services get more and more pervasively available, mobile people can easily interact with service providers and handily communicate with each other through mobile devices. In the mobile environment, mobile users can plan their activity schedules and run their schedules with the assistance of mobile devices. When mobile users are engaged in their activities, they can instantly perceive contextual information and their activity schedules therefore tend to be context dependent, i.e., mobile users may alter their objectives and decision makings as soon as the environmental context varies. Besides, for a mobile user, once any exception happens, he/she is apt to adapt his/her activity schedule to reduce the impact of the exception. In the mobile environment, since the environmental resources are limited and can¡¦t satisfy all mobile users¡¦ demands, conflicts are likely to occur while mobile users plan, alter or adapt their personal activity schedules. This study concentrates itself on resolving the conflicts. This conflict problem is formulated as a multi-criteria context-dependent DCOP (distributed constraint optimization problem). This problem is complicated and highly dynamic, and the joint optimality to this problem might be time-variant. This study proposes an integrated agents system SPA and a novel problem solving approach 2S-DORA to enable mobile users to coordinate their activities to maintain optimality. The SPA, which integrates the Simulated and Physical Agents, is employed to enhance mobile users¡¦ sensory, analytic, reasoning and social abilities. The 2S-DORA takes advantage of the SPA abilities to help mobile users quickly and effectively adapt themselves to the context variations and to the exceptions. This study takes a traveling backpacker problem as an example to demonstrate how the proposed SPA and 2S-DORA contribute to solve the multi-criteria context-dependent DCOP. Five experiments finally are designed to evaluate the performance of the application of SPA and 2S-DORA.

Advances in Internet-of-Things integrate sensors and actuators in everyday items or even people transforming our society at an accelerated pace. This occurs in areas such as agriculture, logistics, transport, healthcare, and smart cities and has created new ways to interact with and experience entertainment, (serious) games, education, etc. Common to these domains is the challenge to realize and maintain complex relations with any object or individual globally, with the requirement for immediacy in maintaining relations of varying complexity. Existing architectures for maintaining relations on the Internet, e.g., DNS and search engines are insufficient in meeting these challenges. Their deficiencies mandate the research presented in this dissertation enabling the maintenance of dynamic and multi-criteria relationships among entities in real-time in an Internet-of-Things while minimizing the overall cost for maintaining such context-centric relationships. A second challenge is the need to represent nearness in context-centric relationships, since solutions need to build on what is closely related. The dissertation shows that the proximity on relations can be used to bring about the scalability of maintaining relationships across the IoT. It successfully demonstrates the concept and feasibility of self-organizing context-centric overlay networks for maintaining scalable and real-time relationships between endpoints co-located with associated physical entities. This is complemented by an object model for annotating objects and their relationships as derived and defined over the underpinning context interactions. Complementing measures of nearness are added through a non-metric multi-criteria approach to evaluating the notion of context proximity. A query language and an extension to the publish-subscribe approaches achieves distributed support for discovering such relationships; locating entities relative to a defined hyper-sphere of interest. Furthermore, it introduces adaptive algorithms for maintaining such relationships at minimal overall costs. The results demonstrate the feasibility of moving towards context-centric approaches to immersion and that such approaches are realizable over vast and distributed heterogeneous collections of user and their associated context information.