Activity-oriented context management for multi-user ubiquitous computing environments: context reasoning and conflict detection/resolution

Abstract

The goal of ubiquitous computing is to build a system which is able to coordinate computing entities embedded in physical environments to support user activities in efficient and unobtrusive ways. It requires the system to be aware of the surrounding contexts of the entities including users, and then respond to the context changes by seamlessly adapting to possibly heterogeneous computing resources with no obstruction to users. Many context-aware systems developed during the last a couple of decades demonstrated the achievements of their respective goals of context-aware ubiquitous computing services. However, most systems employed service environment in that contexts are generated and processed in one-at-a-time manner by focusing on context acquisition and awareness. In recent years a great deal of research challenges have been paid to deal with context-aware processing in the multi-user (or group user) ubiquitous computing environment in that more than one context are produced simultaneously within a space by requesting different contextual services at the same time. The presence of multiple contexts gives rise to the problem of conflicts, in that different contexts are generated and being active simultaneously in the same space each requesting its own context to be served. In this situation, the context-aware operation will not be able to determine proper services. Therefore, strategies for conflict detection and resolution are required for robust context-aware computing services in multi-user context environment. Most of the existing works on conflict management either impose significant specification overhead upon developers or compel users to suffer from unnecessary distraction due to the inaccurate conflict analysis. Moreover, they lack of comprehensive support for conflict resolution and thus they fail to cope with all the conflicts to be resolved on a fair basis. In this dissertation, we give (1) our design and development of a context manag...