FIPA

Proposal for application type

"Travel planning and management"

-CNET/CCETT application proposal-

We propose here an application for FIPA. This application is named " travel planning and management ".

1. Scenario

The basic scénario is the following :

The user queries his " personal assistant " via natural language (voice recognition and/or typed text:

" I must meet M. Kane from Rosebud company in New-York the 29 of september in the afternoon. Plan me a trip for this appointement. "

The system (PDA plus network-based applications) is expected to take the following actions :

• put the meeting in the agenda, and send a confirmation to M. Kane,
• recognize the fact that the user lives and works in Chicago, that the meeting is in New-york, and therefore contact a travel agency to plan a trip,
• book the trip via plane/train via the travel agency,
• use user profile to choose between means of transportation, company, comfort level and price,
• book hotel if necessary (depending on time of arrival/departure), (also use user profile to choose hotel)
• return within half a day a notification of the trip planned,
• insert travel-related time in the agenda, together with alarm-clock,
• notify of iintra-city transportation means to be used :
  • -intra-city means can be : bus, metro, taxi, car-rental etc,
  • -travel from home to airport/station (time necessary to),
  • -travel means to be used in destination : airport-hotel, hotel to appointement, appointment-entertainment.
• put a watchdog on train/plane schedules, warning for delayed/modified svchedules via user preferred notification mean (pager, SMS-GSM, fax ...)
• survey traffic if car/taxi is to be used.

2. Application components

3. Benefits from agent technology

3.1. Features

The above exemple is mean to demonstrate the following agent capacities :

• differed mode for request : the user needs not to be connected while the request is completed,
• vertical brokering : composition of services,
• horizontal brokering : comparison of services,
• auto-learning for user profile,
• speech-and text recognition,
• interoperability of communication means (phone, pager, email, cellular phones/GSM),
• administration of agent agency: ability to track agents,
• alerts triggered by events and forwarde by agents to the user,
• financial transaction, via bank and authentication service (i.e. trusted third-party)
• automatic indexation of services, as they are created, to be used by brolkers and/or users,
• brokers are services, and can be used by other services. The schema aboves distinguish between basic services (plane, meteo) and brokers services (travel agency, bank). The distinction is artificial and introduced here for the clarity of the schema.

3.2. Remark

Of course all the above items can be separately build with non-agent technology. It is our conviction that the use of agent technology and inter-agent communication protocols gives us the only mean for building large (i.e. commercial) systems of services in a modular way.

The advantage of modularity is well-know : it allows "plug-in" software, and painless extension of capabilities. For instance, if the PDA is build on agent technology, an additional software component (natural language interface ...) can be inserted and used without difficulty (just like a web-browser plug-in).

3.3. Type of actions

We can classify the above described features into a set of properties.

 Property
  Feature
 combination of services

 horizontal and vertical brokering
 constrained requests
 user profiling

 personalization
 id.
 time-constraints

 time-limit on request
 speech reconigition
 user interface

 test recognition 
 id. 
 conditional action

 ex : "notify me if plane if delayed"
 notification
  id.

 learning 
 automatic user profiling
 security and confidentiality

 bank transaction 
 authentication
 bank transaction, authentication of mobile agents,..

 research action
 directory services (trading) 

  

Authors and Adresses