A social network approach to resolving group-level conflict in context-aware services

Group conflict that occurs when delivering context-aware services negatively affects service usage within a specific service space, and researchers have proposed few conflict resolution methods to address the issue. This paper presents a methodology to autonomously resolve the conflict arising between users in identical contexts, such as place and computing resources. To do so, a two-phase case-based reasoning method is proposed. To minimize privacy concerns, a social network model is applied to produce key social context data, secondary to personal data, and which is used in place of the users' personal data for case-based reasoning. To show the feasibility of the idea proposed in this paper, a prototype system with simulation-based validation is tested to determine conflict resolution strategies and a simulation test has been performed. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.