Multi-user conflict resolution mechanisms for smart home environments

Context-awareness is a pervasive computing enabling technology that allows context-aware applications to respond to multiple contexts such as activity, location, temperature, and so on. When many users attempt to access the same context-aware application, user conflicts may emerge. This issue is emphasized, and a conflict resolution approach is presented to address it. Although there are other conflict resolution approaches in the literature, the one presented here is unique in that it considers the users’ special cases such as their sickness, examinations, and so on when resolving conflicts. The proposed approach is helpful when several users with different special cases try to access the same context-aware application. To demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach, a conflict manager is integrated with the UbiREAL simulated context-aware home environment. The integrated conflict manager resolves conflicts by taking users special cases into account and employing either automated, mediated, or hybrid conflict resolution approaches. The evaluation of the proposed approach demonstrates that users are satisfied with it and that it is critical and essential to employ users’ special cases in detecting and resolving users conflicts.