IMPROVEMENT OF SERVICE QUALITY BY USING UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING IN HOSPITALITY

Economies of developed countries are primarily based on the services sector, where the hospitality industry plays an important role. As such, new service design and service innovation are vital for maintaining competitive advantage. Recently, ubiquitous computing has emerged as a key enabler in various industries in support of service innovation by facilitating the design of new services. This study aims to investigate the benefits provided by ubiquitous computing in the hospitality domain for improved service quality, customer satisfaction, and profitability. First, the literature on service quality is presented, and important quality dimensions are selected accordingly. After providing a brief review of related technologies and existing applications, a ubiquitous computing framework is proposed in support of innovative services for the hotel industry. Via the analysis of the framework, changes in business processes are exposed and the contributions of ubiquitous computing are discussed according to the identified service quality dimensions

Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey

As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.Comment: IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials Journal, 201

A Computational Architecture Based on RFID Sensors for Traceability in Smart Cities

Information Technology and Communications (ICT) is presented as the main element in order to achieve more efficient and sustainable city resource management, while making sure that the needs of the citizens to improve their quality of life are satisfied. A key element will be the creation of new systems that allow the acquisition of context information, automatically and transparently, in order to provide it to decision support systems. In this paper, we present a novel distributed system for obtaining, representing and providing the flow and movement of people in densely populated geographical areas. In order to accomplish these tasks, we propose the design of a smart sensor network based on RFID communication technologies, reliability patterns and integration techniques. Contrary to other proposals, this system represents a comprehensive solution that permits the acquisition of user information in a transparent and reliable way in a non-controlled and heterogeneous environment. This knowledge will be useful in moving towards the design of smart cities in which decision support on transport strategies, business evaluation or initiatives in the tourism sector will be supported by real relevant information. As a final result, a case study will be presented which will allow the validation of the proposal

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future