Conflict Resolving Algorithms to Resolve Conflict in Multi-user Context-Aware Environments

Conflict Resolution in context-aware computing is getting more significant attention from researchers as ubiquitous computing environments take into account multiple users. For multi-user ubiquitous computing environments, conflicts among users' contexts need to be detected and resolved. For this, application developers or end-users specify conflicts situations, and the underlying ubiquitous computing middleware detects and resolve conflicts between applications when one of the conflict situations arises. In this paper, we propose Conflict manager which employs an array of Conflict Resolving Algorithms to resolve conflicts in Context-aware applications. Conflicts arise when multiple users try to access an application. In order to resolve conflicts among users, the Conflict resolver sums up preferences of users which collide with each other and recommends specific contents depending on different criteria's such as role of the user or the priority assigned with the user. This paper proposes various algorithms where in each algorithm tries to resolve the conflicts among the users considering issues such as starvation. To show the usefulness of the proposed conflict resolution method, we apply the proposed conflict resolution method to Context aware TV, a smart testbed. The conflict manager is built using an array of algorithms which work on the principles of preemption, non preemption, and uses methodologies like Role, Priority, Time slice based approaches. Thereby making the system to provide comprehensible and well suited solutions to cater the versatile needs of the family. The algorithms utilize various factors like priority, credits, age, and time in the above mentioned approaches.