Context-awareness is enabling technology for pervasive computing which allows applications to adapt themselves in response to context (e.g. activity, location, temperature level, etc). However, an issue of user conflicts in context-aware applications may arise when multiple users access the same application, making management of user conflicts an interesting and significant area of research.
Conflict among users must be detected and resolved. Our research focuses on this issue and proposes a conflict resolution approach that will resolve the conflicts in context-aware home applications. The proposed approach takes into consideration the users' special case context (e.g. illness of user) along with their priorities and preferences while detecting and resolving user conflicts. The proposed approach also addresses the issue where multiple users with multiple special cases trying to access one application or service.
This thesis also describes the design and implementation of the proposed approach, which uses different strategies and different approaches to resolve the conflict according to the involved situation to suit the need of the family. A detailed usability study has been carried out and results show that the users are satisfied with the proposed system and using the users' special cases context in detecting and resolving the user conflicts is essential and necessary in the smart home environment.