Intelligent Decision-Making for a Smart Home Environment with Multiple Occupants

Resumen

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) systems rely on the use of environmental information to seamlessly assist users in their daily lives. As the development of AmI architectures is involving a larger amount of users and devices information, the potential occurrence of conflicts derived from the use of this information becomes higher. These conflicts are usually represented as inconsistencies between different pieces of information. As a result, the AmI systems need a mechanism to decide upon these conflicting situations in order to still give an appropriate response. In this chapter we propose the use of Argumentation as a methodology for automatically detecting and solving these conflicting situations. More specifically, we describe a smart TV service which combines different information about viewers’ presence and preferences and TV programs data to elaborate a list of recommending programs. Several arguments for and against recommending a same program are presented to the AmI system. Then, by means of argumentative techniques and several meta-decision criteria, the system is able to assist through mediation in the context of conflicting preferences or needs.