Toward Combining Automatic Resolution with Social Mediation for Resolving Multiuser Conflicts

In spite of intensive effort to resolve conflicts between multiple users of context-aware applications in a smart space, there has been no practical solution for flexibly resolving them based on the situation of the users. In this paper, we propose a mixed resolution method to combine automatic resolution with social participation for resolving multiuser conflicts. For combining the two resolution approaches, various contexts such as preferences, priority, and types of applications are used to select an appropriate resolution method for the encountered conflict. Through an evaluation, we found that the performance of selection algorithms mainly depended on the number of users and the similarity between their preferences, and we derived an appropriate threshold for determining whether users were similar or not. With a user study of 3 applications in a smart-space test-bed, we observed that the combination of automatic resolution when preferences are similar and social mediation when preferences are different effectively resolved multiuser conflict even though social pressure played an important role, and the 3 different applications had different thresholds.