Multilevel simulation of daily activities: Why and how?

A daily activity simulator is proposed to help the development and test of algorithms needed in ambient assisted living projects. The simulator models the activities of a single human inhabitant in a home environment. The human inhabitant, his physical and social environment and the basic interactions among them are also modeled. The sequence of activities is controlled by the dynamically changing priorities of the human actions. It is just as the real life is, where the current most important needs trigger the activities performed by a human agent. The designed simulation runs at multiple abstraction levels; the activities are simulated using main, middle and bottom level actions and can interrupt each other. In addition to the activity simulation the sensors are also defined and the real-life sensor signals are simulated as well. The simulator is already in use in the development of a measurement scheduling system. Then we plan to create two instances of an experimental home environment, one is run by the simulator and the other inhabited by real persons, and compare the generated sensor data of both for many different scenarios. We also would like to create an intelligent feedback layer over the sensors.