eCRM in the Travel Industry

We are bombarded with Internet forecasts and statistics every day, however there is little doubt that the Internet has permanently changed the face of travel promotion and distribution. While only a minority of consumers are actually prepared to buy online at the present time, this minority is growing and there are large numbers of consumers who wish to use the Internet for information and communication. Travel and hospitality companies are selling an information-rich product and will need to leverage the full range of offline and e-channels to engage their customers in dialogue. The Internet does not have any respect for geographic or organisational boundaries and companies will have to forge new business models, involving partnerships and customer-driven product design, in order to meet the needs of the online consumer. There are major challenges and opportunities for companies wishing to add the e to their CRM strategy

Agent-based modelling of air transport demand

Constraints such as opening hours or passenger capacities influence travel options that can be offered by an airport and by the connecting airlines. If infrastructure, policy or technological measures modify transport options, then the benefits do not only depend on the technology, but also on possibly heterogeneous user preferences such as desired arrival times or on the availability of alternative travel modes. This paper proposes an agent-based, iterative assignment procedure to model European air traffic and German passenger demand on a microscopic level, capturing individual passenger preferences. Air transport technology is simulated microscopically, i.e. each aircraft is represented as single unit with attached attributes such as departure time, flight duration or seat availability. Trip-chaining and delay propagation can be added. Microsimulation is used to verify and assess passengers’ choices of travel alternatives, where those choices improve over iterations until an agent-based stochastic user equilibrium is reached. This requires fast simulation models, thus, similar to other approaches in air traffic modelling a queue model is used. In contrast to those approaches, the queue model in this work is solved algorithmically. Overall, the approach is suited to analyze, forecast and evaluate the consequences of mid-distance transport measures

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

A survey on subjecting electronic product code and non-ID objects to IP identification

Over the last decade, both research on the Internet of Things (IoT) and real-world IoT applications have grown exponentially. The IoT provides us with smarter cities, intelligent homes, and generally more comfortable lives. However, the introduction of these devices has led to several new challenges that must be addressed. One of the critical challenges facing interacting with IoT devices is to address billions of devices (things) around the world, including computers, tablets, smartphones, wearable devices, sensors, and embedded computers, and so on. This article provides a survey on subjecting Electronic Product Code and non-ID objects to IP identification for IoT devices, including their advantages and disadvantages thereof. Different metrics are here proposed and used for evaluating these methods. In particular, the main methods are evaluated in terms of their: (i) computational overhead, (ii) scalability, (iii) adaptability, (iv) implementation cost, and (v) whether applicable to already ID-based objects and presented in tabular format. Finally, the article proves that this field of research will still be ongoing, but any new technique must favorably offer the mentioned five evaluative parameters.Comment: 112 references, 8 figures, 6 tables, Journal of Engineering Reports, Wiley, 2020 (Open Access

Innovative in silico approaches to address avian flu using grid technology

The recent years have seen the emergence of diseases which have spread very quickly all around the world either through human travels like SARS or animal migration like avian flu. Among the biggest challenges raised by infectious emerging diseases, one is related to the constant mutation of the viruses which turns them into continuously moving targets for drug and vaccine discovery. Another challenge is related to the early detection and surveillance of the diseases as new cases can appear just anywhere due to the globalization of exchanges and the circulation of people and animals around the earth, as recently demonstrated by the avian flu epidemics. For 3 years now, a collaboration of teams in Europe and Asia has been exploring some innovative in silico approaches to better tackle avian flu taking advantage of the very large computing resources available on international grid infrastructures. Grids were used to study the impact of mutations on the effectiveness of existing drugs against H5N1 and to find potentially new leads active on mutated strains. Grids allow also the integration of distributed data in a completely secured way. The paper presents how we are currently exploring how to integrate the existing data sources towards a global surveillance network for molecular epidemiology.Comment: 7 pages, submitted to Infectious Disorders - Drug Target

A review of personal communications services

This article can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2009 Nova Science Publishers, LtdPCS is an acronym for Personal Communications Service. PCS has two layers of meaning. At the low layer, from the technical perspective, PCS is a 2G mobile communication technology operating at the 1900 MHz frequency range. At the upper layer, PCS is often used as an umbrella term that includes various wireless access and personal mobility services with the ultimate goal of enabling users to freely communicate with anyone at anytime and anywhere according to their demand. Ubiquitous PCS can be implemented by integrating the wireless and wireline systems on the basis of intelligent network (IN), which provides network functions of terminal and personal mobility. In this chapter, we focus on various aspects of PCS except location management. First we describe the motivation and technological evolution for personal communications. Then we introduce three key issues related to PCS: spectrum allocation, mobility, and standardization efforts. Since PCS involves several different communication technologies, we introduce its heterogeneous and distributed system architecture. IN is also described in detail because it plays a critical role in the development of PCS. Finally, we introduce the application of PCS and its deployment status since the mid-term of 1990’s.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60673159 and 70671020; the National High-Tech Research and Development Plan of China under Grant No. 2006AA01Z214, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of UK under Grant EP/E060722/1

Smart Home and Artificial Intelligence as Environment for the Implementation of New Technologies

The technologies of a smart home and artificial intelligence (AI) are now inextricably linked. The perception and consideration of these technologies as a single system will make it possible to significantly simplify the approach to their study, design and implementation. The introduction of AI in managing the infrastructure of a smart home is a process of irreversible close future at the level with personal assistants and autopilots. It is extremely important to standardize, create and follow the typical models of information gathering and device management in a smart home, which should lead in the future to create a data analysis model and decision making through the software implementation of a specialized AI. AI techniques such as multi-agent systems, neural networks, fuzzy logic will form the basis for the functioning of a smart home in the future. The problems of diversity of data and models and the absence of centralized popular team decisions in this area significantly slow down further development. A big problem is a low percentage of open source data and code in the smart home and the AI when the research results are mostly unpublished and difficult to reproduce and implement independently. The proposed ways of finding solutions to models and standards can significantly accelerate the development of specialized AIs to manage a smart home and create an environment for the emergence of native innovative solutions based on analysis of data from sensors collected by monitoring systems of smart home. Particular attention should be paid to the search for resource savings and the profit from surpluses that will push for the development of these technologies and the transition from a level of prospect to technology exchange and the acquisition of benefits.The technologies of a smart home and artificial intelligence (AI) are now inextricably linked. The perception and consideration of these technologies as a single system will make it possible to significantly simplify the approach to their study, design and implementation. The introduction of AI in managing the infrastructure of a smart home is a process of irreversible close future at the level with personal assistants and autopilots. It is extremely important to standardize, create and follow the typical models of information gathering and device management in a smart home, which should lead in the future to create a data analysis model and decision making through the software implementation of a specialized AI. AI techniques such as multi-agent systems, neural networks, fuzzy logic will form the basis for the functioning of a smart home in the future. The problems of diversity of data and models and the absence of centralized popular team decisions in this area significantly slow down further development. A big problem is a low percentage of open source data and code in the smart home and the AI when the research results are mostly unpublished and difficult to reproduce and implement independently. The proposed ways of finding solutions to models and standards can significantly accelerate the development of specialized AIs to manage a smart home and create an environment for the emergence of native innovative solutions based on analysis of data from sensors collected by monitoring systems of smart home. Particular attention should be paid to the search for resource savings and the profit from surpluses that will push for the development of these technologies and the transition from a level of prospect to technology exchange and the acquisition of benefits

Semi-autonomous, context-aware, agent using behaviour modelling and reputation systems to authorize data operation in the Internet of Things

In this paper we address the issue of gathering the "informed consent" of an end user in the Internet of Things. We start by evaluating the legal importance and some of the problems linked with this notion of informed consent in the specific context of the Internet of Things. From this assessment we propose an approach based on a semi-autonomous, rule based agent that centralize all authorization decisions on the personal data of a user and that is able to take decision on his behalf. We complete this initial agent by integrating context-awareness, behavior modeling and community based reputation system in the algorithm of the agent. The resulting system is a "smart" application, the "privacy butler" that can handle data operations on behalf of the end-user while keeping the user in control. We finally discuss some of the potential problems and improvements of the system.Comment: This work is currently supported by the BUTLER Project co-financed under the 7th framework program of the European Commission. published in Internet of Things (WF-IoT), 2014 IEEE World Forum, 6-8 March 2014, Seoul, P411-416, DOI: 10.1109/WF-IoT.2014.6803201, INSPEC: 1425565