CASCOM Project

AUTHORS: Oliver Keller 1*, Matthias Klusch 1 

INSTITUTIONS: 1 DFKI Saarbruecken, Germany. 

BACKGROUND: 
The vision of the CASCOM approach is that ubiquitous application services are flexibly co-ordinated and pervasively provided to the mobile users by intelligent agents in dynamically changing contexts of open, large-scale, pervasive environments. For end users, the CASCOM system provides easy and seamless access to semantic Web services anytime, anywhere, and using any device. This will give more freedom to mobile workers to do their job whenever and wherever needed. For network operators, the CASCOM aims towards vision of seamless service experience providing better customer satisfaction, which in turn helps to retain current customer relations as well as attract new customers. For service providers CASCOM provides an innovative platform for various mobile business application services.

OBJECTIVE: 
Main objective of CASCOM is to implement, validate, and trial value-added supportive infrastructure for business application services for mobile workers and users across mobile and fixed networks. 

METHODS: 
The essential approach of CASCOM is the innovative combination of intelligent agent technology, semantic Web services, peer-to-peer, and mobile computing for intelligent peer-to-peer mobile service environments. Conventional peer-to-peer computing environments are extended with components for mobile and wireless communication. The services of CASCOM environments are provided by peer software agents which exploit the CASCOM coordination infrastructure to efficiently operate in highly dynamic environments. The generic CASCOM intelligent peer-to-peer infrastructure includes efficient communication means, support for context-aware adaptation techniques, as well as dynamic and secure service discovery and composition planning. 

RESULTS: 
CASCOM already developed innovative means of context-aware, intelligent Web service discovery, composition planning, and execution in P2P networks. The prototype of the generic CASCOM service coordination system has been successfully trialed for selected mobile health care application services. A second field trial is in preparation. In contrast to the full CASCOM system, the CASCOM Web demonstrator (2) covers the trial use case only in part. 

CONCLUSION: In this talk, I will outline the key innovations of the implemented mobile CASCOM service coordination system and its application to a selected use case of emergency medical assistance and patient repatriation. The real-world trial of the CASCOM system recently conducted with TILAK in the region of Innsbruck will be shown by demonstration (video).

REFERENCES: 
1. CASCOM Consortium. Public Deliverables of CASCOM Project. http://www.ist-cascom.org [Deliverables] 
2. CASCOM Consortium: The CASCOM Web Demonstrator http://www.frame-tech.it:8080/cascom/