Contextual defeasible logic and its application to ambient intelligence

The imperfect nature of context in ambient intelligence environments, and the special characteristics of the entities that possess and share the available context information render contextual reasoning a very challenging task. The accomplishment of this task requires formal models that handle the involved entities as autonomous logic-based agents, and provide methods for handling the imperfect and distributed nature of context. We propose a solution based on the multi-context systems (MCS) formalism, in which local context knowledge of ambient agents is encoded in rule theories (contexts), and information flow between agents is achieved through mapping rules, associating concepts used by different contexts. To handle the imperfect nature of context, we extend MCS with non-monotonic features-local defeasible theories, defeasible mappings, and a preference ordering on the system contexts. In this paper, we present the novel representation model, called contextual defeasible logic, describe how its elements are used to derive distributed conclusions through a proof theory, and propose an algorithm for distributed query evaluation that implements the proof theory of contextual defeasible logic. The application of the proposed approach in a scenario from the ambient intelligence domain demonstrates how its distinct features overcome the challenges imposed by the special characteristics of ambient intelligence environments.