Unwanted Periodic Behaviour in Pervasive Computing Environments

This paper addresses a fundamental problem related to the interaction of autonomous agents in pervasive and intelligent environments. Such autonomous agent could be static, nomadic or highly mobile, and in general, be programmed (rule based) to produce required behaviours by different users. In addition, the communication between these agents may include delays, because of the network, or because their own speed of processing the information. These two characteristics - the rules of behaviour and the temporal delays - could lead the system to display some unwanted periodic behaviour. In this paper we describe our work in progress which includes a framework to study this problem, and a set of initial guidelines to detect this behaviour. We conclude by describing the future direction of our work