Infrastructure of an Adaptive Multi-agent System for Presentation of Mathematical Expression to Visually-Impaired Users

A. Awdé, C. Tadj, Y. Bellik

The infrastructure of our adaptive system is aimed at correctly presenting a mathematical expression to visually impaired users. Its design is based on a multi-agent system that determines the appropriate presentation format based on the given interaction context (i.e. combined user, environment and system contexts) and the expression complexity as well as the user preferences. The architecture of our infrastructure is layered, thus encapsulating the components of the various layers. The system design is intended to be adaptive, fault tolerant and is capable of self-adaptation under varying conditions (e.g. missing or defective components). In case of failure of media device, our system is capable of replacing the faulty component with a new one (if a replacement is available). If replacement is not possible, the system re-determines the new modality and presentation format apt for the new configuration. The human intervention is greatly reduced in our system as it is capable of selfconfiguration, and learning. In our work, agent communication simulation has been carried out on the Java Agent Development Framework (JADE) platform. This work is our continuing contribution to advance research on making informatics more accessible to handicapped users.