Wireless Collaboration for Context-Aware Services using Mobile Networked Applications

The rapid increase of mobile device usage across all organisational and social levels has sparked the development of pervasive solutions for the improvement of many daily processes. Recent advances in ubiquitous computing offer new opportunities, with the promise of providing a better modeling of the mobility, collaboration and context-awareness of the different actors involved. With increasing communication capabilities such as Infrared, Bluetooth or W-LAN, mobile devices allow new and interesting ways to achieve collaboration among their users. Moreover, the increasing number of sensor networks and sensing devices allows the design of new types of technologies that combine these new capabilities in order to form pervasive solutions. This paper addresses the design and implementation of a mobile, context-aware human resource scheduling application that is distributed over several mobile devices using wireless technologies. Each instance of the application uses the concept of a trail, which is a collection of locations together with associated information. Activities to be performed by users are aggregated by the application and dispatched to users' trails based on the current context. This concept creates a collaborative environment that enables efficient resource scheduling across multiple users, providing location-based services using ubiquitous technologies.

I. Introduction

The challenge of efficient resource allocation is omnipresent in all types of organisations and companies across the global marketplace. Although these resources have traditionally been very static-based, the continuous global economic shift to the service sector has lifted human resources to become the dominant assets of most organisations. At the same time, a development needs to be observed in terms of increased workforce mobility, as the tertiary sector is characterised by a variety of movements of the human resources involved. The rapid increase of mobile device usage supports growing mobility and is therefore one of the driving forces towards new and intelligent solutions for the improvement of daily processes. Advances in pervasive computing offer new opportunities for improving traditional methods of resource allocation, with the promise of providing a better model of the mobility, collaboration and context-awareness of the various actors involved.