Imagine an environment in which every man-made object had an embedded computer and the ability to communicate wirelessly with other nearby objects. This would include not only stationary objects such as merchandise stored on warehouse shelves, but also mobile objects such as cars, PDAs, cell phones, wallets, even people.
More abstractly, we can view an environment of smart objects as a kind of society of agents playing client and provider roles.
This is the vision of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), also called ambient intelligence (AmI) or every-ware. Recently, the idea has taken a step closer to reality by the introduction of inexpensive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. An RFID tag consists of a memory circuit, possibly a small processor circuit, and an antenna capable of sending and receiving signals a distance of a few meters. Basically, it's like a bar code, but with a lot more memory.
Imagine walking into a grocery store, filling up your cart, and walking out the door. As you walk out, the items in your cart say goodbye to the cash register and the cash register debits the credit card in your wallet!
Conducting inventory in the grocery store just got easier. The manager simply walks up and down the aisles with his specially programmed PDA.
What about a shopping list? Use your cell phone to call your cookbook at home. Select a few recipes. Ask the cookbook to scan the items in the cupboard and refrigerator to see if you have sufficient quantities of the necessary ingredients!
The Sims provides an interesting application of ambient intelligence architecture. Characters broadcast their needs while objects broadcast their services. When needs match nearby services, the character and the object are united.
Thinking about The Sims, ambient intelligence, supply chains, and a social simulation called SugarScape gave me the idea of a variant of SugarScape that could serve as a reference architecture for ambient intelligence.