Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

To deal with the uncertainty of job dispatching in mobile workforce management, we have proposed a framework, (ROBALO) (Cha et al., 2005), to ease the tension between (a) the reliability requirement to serve a job request, and (b) the cost of the job’s assignment. In ROBALO, the risks for workers to execute a job are taken into consideration. Such consideration is especially useful in the scenario of mobile workforce management because mobile workers usually meet unexpected situations in the field. Therefore, we can find the job assignment with the minimum cost under a certain degree of risk. Therefore, the job dispatcher can reserve enough resources and make enough preparations for a incident. Our previous work focuses on the scenario of online job dispatching, which chooses a worker or a working group to serve every incoming job request independently. In this article, we further extend to the batch model and propose a sub-optimal approach for batch job dispatching to form a complete framework.

The evolution of mobile and ubiquitous technologies gives promises for computational services and resources to support and influence work processes planned or performed in physical work environments. Such support should optimally provide the workers with a safer work environment for both the environment itself and the workers. The extended support can give more economic and optimal work processes through proactive and situated planning and execution. We introduce the concept of a to capture adaptive and context-aware process support. This combination of ubiquitous computing and workflow defines a new research direction to be investigated. This paper elaborates on research challenges related to how smart work processes can be supported. We present and discuss general cases where context information or change in context information influences mobile work activities. Finally, we propose a framework for modelling smart work processes, and present a high-level architecture to support smart work processes.

This paper extends common contentions of why the mobile Internet has been widely embraced in Japan but obtained lukewarm reaction in most GSM countries. In particular, we analyze commonalities and differences pertaining to the wireless killer application in both the West and the East — messaging. A framework consisting of service specifications, properties and gratifications is used to analyze short messaging, multimedia messaging and e-mail in Scandinavia and Japan. An architecture which better supports interlinking, integrating and transitioning of interpersonal and data-based communications over the service platform was successfully established in Japan while the disjointed nature of messaging, multimedia messaging and data services has inhibited Scandinavian users to fully embrace the mobile Internet. In Japan mobile e-mail integrated instrumental and aesthetic service properties on top of the powerful expressive service properties. Accordingly, content and process gratifications have augmented powerful social gratifications which initially have been driving m-service use in both places. Idiosyncrasies identified across service integration provide insights to critical enabling and constraining factors that shape development of mobile services.

This paper will examine the concept of an innovation spiral process in relationship to the mobile communications sector of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry which is the product of convergence of the telecommunications and the information technology (IT) industries. The fundamental theoretical framework for the paper is that innovative applications prescribed by users of an adopted technology can be a significant driver of further product evolution which then can fuel further market innovation. New products that are spectacularly’ successful’ are those that give rise to this spiral of product innovation and market innovation. The paper will first review the macro perspective of this theoretical framework by analysing the spectacular success of the short message service (SMS) in the GSM digital mobile communications over the last twenty years from the product concept. This conceptual framework is then considered at a micro level to review three consecutive research projects by the authors over the last ten years. The broad aim of these projects was to better understand potential user adoption of new mobile telecommunications products. The first research project in the mid 1990’s examined the barriers and enablers to the adoption of mobile phones by selected disadvantaged groups in society, in particular, people with disabilities. A modified focus group methodology based on interactive workshops was developed from this research project to gain insights into user innovation. This methodology was developed further in more recent research projects looking at the likely user take up of evolving multimedia capable mobile devices for innovative applications. The second study indicated that the market evolution of mobile internet like applications is likely to be very different from those developed for the fixed internet because of the different characteristics of the user groups. While the individual research projects have been published, this paper brings together the macro and micro perspectives of this innovation spiral to demonstrate the value of this theoretical framework for market forecasting for realising technology commercialisation. The research also has implications for the ‘form’ of new high technology products and how they are marketed which places less emphasis on technical features but more on matching with user needs.

Based on a survey of 294 Swiss businesses, the study describes the desolate state of the art of mobile data services in relation to forecasts and different investment strategies employed by companies. Additionally, an investment confidence indicator is presented. In a next step, using a contingency analysis, it may be concluded that in Switzerland, which may act as an indictor country for Western Europe, there exists a (set of) common factor(s) of non-technical nature, which detain(s) companies from adopting mobile data, services. A probing insight into the reasons why companies refrain from implementing mobile data services is given afterwards. Lastly, a concluding summary as well as a reference to a continuative research project is provided.

Citizens and local government services are often not as well connected as they ideally should be. Services may not be well advertised or may simply be cumbersome or time-consuming to access. In this paper we present our ongoing work in investigating hew to better connect the citizen with their local government with the support of context-aware applications. We describe a set of user requirements for m-government services and open service-oriented platforms. In particular, we analyze the requirements and present the research issues on a context modeling component for supporting context-aware service discovery. Our motivation to develop it is driven by the need to provide appropriate local government services in an easily accessible manner whenever and wherever they may be needed.

The increased availability of context information and the widespread adoption of more and mote powerful devices creates the opportunity and desire for context-aware applications. In this paper we focus on a specific but important type of applications: workflow applications. Just like other applications, workflows too require context-aware capabilities, that is, require the capability of modeling business logic that is sensitive and varies depending on the users’ context. In this paper, we propose a methodology for context-sensitive business processes development. We extend existing process modeling languages to allow modelling context sensitive regions (i.e, parts of the business process that may have different behaviours depending on context). We also introduce as a mean to identify the contextual situations (and in particular context change situations) that may have an impact on the behaviour of a business process. Finally, we propose a set of transformation rules that allow generating a BPEL-based business process from a context sensitive business process. This allows using existing process engines to support context-sensitive business processes

Adaptive Web information systems need to exploit information about the context of the client in order to deliver, in an appropriate way, relevant information. In this paper, we present a general approach to this problem that is able to handle heterogeneous context information and different coordinates of adaptation. The approach is based on a general notion of profile that can be used to represent a variety of contexts at different level of details. Client profiles, possibly expressed in different formats, are wrapped and translated into such a general representation. The analysis of profiles drives the generation of an interface configuration. A configuration specifies, at the various layers of a Web based Information System (content, navigation and presentation), how to build a response that meets the requirements of adaptation of the profile. We describe architecture and functionality of a prototype implementing such adaptation methodology and illustrate practical examples of use of the prototype.

Context-awareness has been recognized as a very desirable feature for mobile internet services. This paper considers the acquisition of context information for continuous services, i.e., services that persist in time, like streaming services. Supporting context-awareness for these services requires the continuous monitoring of context information. The paper presents the extension of a middleware architecture for the reconciliation of distributed context information to support context-aware continuous services. The paper also addresses optimization issues and illustrates an adaptive video streaming prototype used to test the middleware.

Our goal, in this paper, is to present the effectiveness of an inteimediary frame-work to provide mobile-oriented services via edge services. To this end we developed services for device independence in such a way that content is adapted according to the capabilities of the target devices.