Mobile Intelligence

14.6 CONCLUSION

Flexible offices can drastically reduce costs by dynamically assigning office rooms to present employees. This organization requires a sophisticated software system that is highly dynamic, scalable, context-aware, self-configuring, self-optimizing, self-healing, and self-protecting. In this chapter, we presented our research experiences with a flexible office environment that satisfy these requirements. Due to the organization of our department with fixed offices, we cannot investigate the flexible office paradigm itself. However, we developed and implemented a suitable ubiquitous middleware, a mobile agent system for encapsulation of user context, a location-tracking system, and location-prediction techniques. Office rooms can be dynamically assigned to currently present employees. Applications are realized through mobile agents that offer a possibility to encapsulate personal information of a user and to perform location-based services of the ubiquitous system in the name of the user. Persons and objects are tracked by a location-tracking system that is integrated as an additional ubiquitous service. Moreover, a location-prediction service provides assumptions in which an absent office owner will be next and when he/she will be back. To increase manageability of the complex system, we designed a middleware to fulfill the autonomic or organic computing demands of self-configuration, self-optimization, self-healing, and self-protection. We investigated self-configuration ...