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This paper discusses a multi-agent system (MAS) core developed for an intelligent environment (IE) application. MAS poses features like distributed control, cooperative decision making, and remote monitoring which make it suitable for IE applications. The proposed MAS consists of four intelligent components namely accumulative personal preferences learning, intelligent resources allocation, reactive controls and context-aware proactive controls. It directly interacts with the occupants of the IE and interfaces with the underlying physical device control software. The tool used to develop the MAS is called JADE (Java Agent DEvelopment Framework), a FIPA (Foundation of Intelligent Physical Agent)-compliant development framework. It contains a group of libraries to assist the development of MASs, a platform independent runtime environment and a set of graphical tools for monitoring and debugging the designed system. The preliminary MAS core is developed and tested in Windows XP environment and is implemented only with simple reactive controls. At later stage of the research, the reactive controls will be strengthened and other intelligent components will be added to complete the system. The ultimate goal of this project is to achieve a fully integrated proactive control system via context-aware, cooperative multi-agent learning and decision making. (6 pages)