Travel plans are getting wings post Covid vaccination, be it business or leisure. As of now, 40 million people in United States have been given the doses. Most popular tourist destinations New York City, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Orlando, Chicago and business hubs Texas, New York, California, Illinois are gearing up to welcome warmly.
Mobile based technologies are increasing. Even your mobile can work as a travel guide for you. Research scholar Arturo Perez Pulido has designed the mobile system which is able to program a travel route, and modify it according to the conditions of the places to visit and the available time for the traveler.
The size, portability, and communication capabilities of mobile provide opportunities for new types of services. The telecommunication industry expects a new expansion with the development of UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) and third generation mobile systems. New challenges of this field require a technology that facilitates the construction of more dynamic, intelligent, flexible and open applications, capable of working in a real time environment. Because of its distributed nature, software agents are a promising approach for addressing these issues. Furthermore, when considering mobile services we should also be concerned about changes in the environment when a user moves from one location to another. Therefore, the software should be context aware and able to adapt to new situations. Multi-agent systems can fit in changing environments, as they are built as a combination of flexible components, some of them with planning and learning capabilities. This project presents a tourist guide service, which works on mobile devices, as an application of agent technology that addresses these issues.
There are several types of agents in the system. Some of them are working in the mobile devices, essentially for interaction with the user, and others are distributed in servers, which have advanced information processing and reasoning capabilities. One interesting fact concerning these second type of agents is the way they combine the Beliefs-Desires-Intentions approach with learning capabilities of Case Base Reasoning techniques, which facilitates context-aware behavior that makes use of past experiences to find the best plans to achieve goals. The whole system has been designed using an agent-oriented methodology, INGENIAS. Engineering for Software Agents, INGENIAS is an open-source software framework for the analysis, design and implementation of multi-agent systems. One of the motivations of this work is to show how a real service for mobile devices can be developed using agent-related concepts and principles, and this is illustrated with this methodology. The next section describes the mobile tourist guide service and its main components, which are organized as a multi-agent system. The system will design a tourist route, and modify it according to the conditions of the places to visit and the available time for the tourist. Because of its design, the services of the tourist guide agent can be easily extended.