Solving collective conflicts in a disaster emergency attendance application

The context-aware computing is a research field that defines systems capable of adapting their behavior according to any relevant information about entities (e.g., people, places and objects) of interest. Ubiquitous systems are closely related to the use of contexts and are frequently shared among multiple users, once they are designed to be embedded into everyday environments such as houses, cars, and offices. In scenarios where more than one user shares the same ubiquitous context-aware application, conflicts may occur during adaptation actions due to individual profile divergences and/or environment resource incompatibility. In such situations it is interesting to use some mechanism to detect and solve those conflicts, considering what is better for the group but also being fair enough with each individual demand, whenever possible. This work presents the important concepts in the collective ubiquitous context-aware applications field through a disaster emergency attendance application. Furthermore, the proposal of a methodology for conflict detection and resolution is described. The obtained simulation results showed how this methodology can maintain the application working properly while solving the collective conflicts, managing resource consumption and providing an interesting user satisfaction average.