Toward Combining Automatic Resolution with Social Mediation for Resolving Multiuser Conflicts

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. In spite of intensive effort to resolve conflicts between multiple users of context-aware applications in a smart space, there has been no practical solution for flexibly resolving them based on the situation of the users. In this paper, we propose a mixed resolution method to combine automatic resolution with social participation for resolving multiuser conflicts. For combining the two resolution approaches, various contexts such as preferences, priority, and types of applications are used to select an appropriate resolution method for the encountered conflict. Through an evaluation, we found that the performance of selection algorithms mainly depended on the number of users and the similarity between their preferences, and we derived an appropriate threshold for determining whether users were similar or not. With a user study of 3 applications in a smart-space test-bed, we observed that the combination of automatic resolution when preferences are similar and social mediation when preferences are different effectively resolved multiuser conflict even though social pressure played an important role, and the 3 different applications had different thresholds. INTRODUCTION With new computing paradigms such as ubiquitous computing and pervasive computing, smart-space applications have been evolving toward meeting the needs of residents by exploiting contextual information of users and their surroundings (Dey et al. 2001; Schmidt and Van Laerhoven 2001). In the case where a single user is 147 using smart-space applications, a user has complete control over all applications, and the aim of the applications is to provide the user with his/her desired personalized services and responses. In contrast, for the case where multiple users are using smart-space applications, all users are occupants of the space and expect the applications to respond to their individual desires. Family members, in smart homes, regularly …