A need-awaring multi-agent approach to nomadic community computing for ad hoc need identification and group formation

Recently, community computing has been proposed for group formation and group decision-making. However, legacy community computing systems do not support group need identification for ad hoc group formation, which would be one of key features of ubiquitous decision support systems and services. Hence, this paper aims to provide a multi-agent based methodology to enable nomadic community computing which supports ad hoc need identification and group formation. Focusing on supporting group decision-making of relatively small sized multiple individual in a community, the methodology copes with the following three characteristics: (1) ad hoc group formation, (2) context-aware group need identification, and (3) using mobile devices working in- and out-doors. NAMA-US, an RFID-based prototype system, has been developed to show the feasibility of the idea proposed in this paper.