Building the Software Infrastructure for Smart Classroom: From Open Agent Architecture (OAA) to Smart Platform

Smart Classroom is a Smart Space developed to enhance tele-education practice. This paper describes the considerations of bringing forward Smart Platform as the software infrastructure of Smart Classroom system, abandoning the former implementation based on OAA. As a multi-agent system for Smart Space, Smart Platform encompasses following features: spontaneous discovery of runtime environment, automatic management and resolving of agent dependencies, combination of delegated communication and peer-to-peer communication, etc. In addition, a surrogate agent on Smart Platform and Metaglue from MIT is now being developed to inter-connect Smart Classroom with MIT's Intelligent Room to extend their functionality.