iMuseumA: An Agent-Based Context-Aware Intelligent Museum System

Currently, museums provide their visitors with interactive tour guide applications that can be installed in mobile devices and provide timely tailor-made multimedia information about exhibits on display. In this paper, we argue that mobile devices not only could provide help to visitors, but also to museum staff. Our goal is to integrate, within the same system, multimedia tour guides with the management facilities required by museums. In this paper, we present iMuseumA (intelligent museum with agents), a mobile-based solution to customize visits and perform context-aware management tasks. iMuseumA follows an agent-based approach, which makes it possible to interact easily with the museum environment and make decisions based on its current status. This system is currently deployed in the Museum of Informatics at the Informatics School of the University of Málaga, and its main contributions are: (i) a mobile application that provides management facilities to museum staff by means of sensing and processing environmental data; (ii) providing an integrated solution for visitors, tour guides and museum staff that allows coordination and communication enrichment among different groups of users; (iii) using and benefiting from group communication for heterogeneous groups of users that can be created on demand.