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The purpose of this paper is to present an ontology‐based approach of context‐sensitive computing for the optimization of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS).

A context‐sensitive computing approach is presented, integrated on top of FMS control platform. The approach addresses how to extract manufacturing contexts at source, how to process contextual entities by developing an ontology‐based context model and how to utilize this approach for real time decision making to optimize the key performance indicators (KPIs). A framework for such an optimization support system is proposed. A practical FMS use case within SOA‐based control architecture is considered as an illustrative example and the implementation of the core functionalities to the use case is reported.

Continuous improvement of the factory can be enhanced utilizing context‐sensitive support applications, which provides an intelligent interface for knowledge acquisition and elicitation. This can be used for improved data analysis and diagnostics, real time feedback control and support for optimization.

The performance of context‐sensitive computing increases with the extraction, modeling and reasoning of as much contexts as possible. However, more computational resources and processing times are associated to this. Hence, the trade‐off should be in between the extent of context processing and the required outcome of the support applications.

This paper includes the practical implications of context‐sensitive applications development in manufacturing, especially in the dynamic operating environment of FMS.

Reported results provide a modular approach of context‐sensitive computing and a practical use case implementation to achieve context awareness in FMS. The results are seen extendable to other manufacturing domains.

The key trends in emerging ICT integration choices for cost‐effective, flexible knowledge integration, work‐flow‐embedded evaluation and eCRM‐driven value innovation are examined. Enterprise knowledge integration initiatives can create socio‐technical and cultural tensions as well as possible straitjacketing of business process architectures thus suppressing responsive business re‐engineering and causing loss of competitive advantage for some companies. A framework, C‐assure, is presented for optimising knowledge integration, impact analysis and evaluation to support innovation throughout the various interacting enterprise lifecycles.

The emergence of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology promises enormous opportunities to shift business process automation up to the wire level. The purpose of this paper is to explore the methodology of incorporating business logics into RFID edge systems, and thereby facilitate the business process automation in the RFID‐applied environment.

Following the object‐oriented modelling perspective, concepts of classes, instances are deployed to characterise the runtime context of RFID business scenarios; event patterns are used to aggregate RFID tag read events into business meaningful events; and business rules are established to automate business transactions according to the elicited events.

The paper has emphasised the synergy between business process automation and automatic data acquisition, and has identified the inter‐relations between RFID tag read events, application‐level events, business rules, and business operations. The reported research has demonstrated a feasible scheme of incorporating business process control and automation into RFID‐enabled applications.

The paper analyses the characteristics of RFID data and event handling in relation to business rule modelling and process automation. The features of event‐relied awareness, context containment and overlapping, etc. are all captured and described by the proposed object‐oriented business model. The given data‐driven RFID middleware architecture can serve as one reference architecture for system design and development. Hence, the paper plays an important role in connecting automatic data acquisition and existing business processes, and thereby bridges the physical world and the digital world.

The growing turbulence of the external environment has progressively led to the necessity by organizations of exploiting new opportunities provided by data-driven approaches for supporting the even more complex decision-making processes. The new digital environment has led to the development and adoption of innovative approaches; also in the urban context which has always been characterized by different, interconnected, and dynamic dimensions. Urban governance models have been enhanced by smart technologies, which act as enablers of advanced services and foster connections between citizens, public and private organizations, and decision-makers. In this context, the objective of this chapter is to examine the role of data-driven approaches in the urban context during the chaotic and high variable circumstances related to the diffusion of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19). Thanks to the adoption of the co-evolutionary perspective, a cycle in urban governance decision-making approach based on digital technologies is depicted and its contribution for managing the ongoing Covid-19 is traced. The results of the analysis highlight how the data-driven approach supports urban decision-making process and shed light on the co-evolutionary perspective as heuristic device to map the interactions settled in the networks between local governments, data-driven technologies, and citizens. In this sense, this chapter offers interesting insights, potentially capable of generating useful implications for both researchers and professionals in the public sector.

The purpose of this paper is to characterise a number of current and future computing environments and summarises their resource discovery requirements. It then seeks to analyse, with respect to the requirements of each environment, several established service discovery protocols and some newer protocols that are still in the research domain. In addition, the key features of a new resource discovery protocol that has been developed to operate with heterogeneous computing environments are described.

A comprehensive literature survey was undertaken, highlighting the shortcomings of existing resource discovery protocols with respect to large pervasive computing environments. Given the identified gaps in existing protocols, an alternative protocol is suggested.

The main findings of this paper relate to the identified shortcomings of existing resource discovery protocols. It was also found that a hybrid resource discovery protocol capable of spanning dynamic, mobile computing environments and more stable ones was able to overcome many of the challenges presented by large‐scale pervasive computing environments.

This paper presents comprehensive literature survey of the state‐of‐the‐art in resource discovery protocols, pointing out some of the problems that are not solved. The paper describes the design of an alternative protocol, and presents an evaluation of it. The pervasive computing research community can draw upon the survey and evaluation to guide the design of future resource discovery protocols for the increasingly dynamic world in which we live.

Briefly reviews previous literature by the author before presenting an original 12 step system integration protocol designed to ensure the success of companies or countries in their efforts to develop and market new products. Looks at the issues from different strategic levels such as corporate, international, military and economic. Presents 31 case studies, including the success of Japan in microchips to the failure of Xerox to sell its invention of the Alto personal computer 3 years before Apple: from the success in DNA and Superconductor research to the success of Sunbeam in inventing and marketing food processors: and from the daring invention and production of atomic energy for survival to the successes of sewing machine inventor Howe in co‐operating on patents to compete in markets. Includes 306 questions and answers in order to qualify concepts introduced.

Context awareness is one of the key aspects of pervasive computing systems. In such systems, a plethora of dynamic context information needs to be constantly retrieved, soundly interpreted, rapidly processed, maintained in various repositories, and securely disseminated. Thus, a flexible, scalable and interoperable context representation scheme needs to be established and solid context management mechanisms need to be adopted, which will perform well in large‐scale distributed pervasive systems. This paper elaborates on the COMPACT context middleware that has been designed to cope with the issues above and saturate pervasive computing environments with context awareness functionality.

Pervasive computing environments such as a pervasive campus domain, shopping, etc. will become commonplaces in the near future. The key to enhance these system environments with services relies on the ability to effectively model and represent contextual information, as well as spontaneity in downloading and executing the service interface on a mobile device. The system needs to provide an infrastructure that handles the interaction between a client device that requests a service and a server which responds to the client's request via Web service calls. The system should relieve end‐users from low‐level tasks of matching services with locations or other context information. The mobile users do not need to know or have any knowledge of where the service resides, how to call a service, what the service API detail is and how to execute a service once downloaded. All these low‐level tasks can be handled implicitly by a system. The aim of this paper is to investigate the notion of context‐aware regulated services, and how they should be designed, and implemented.

The paper presents a detailed design, and prototype implementation of the system, called mobile hanging services (MHS), that provides the ability to execute mobile code (service application) on demand and control entities' behaviours in accessing services in pervasive computing environments. Extensive evaluation of this prototype is also provided.

The framework presented in this paper enables a novel contextual services infrastructure that allows services to be described at a high level of abstraction and to be regulated by contextual policies. This contextual policy governs the visibility and execution of contextual services in the environment. In addition, a range of contextual services is developed to illustrate different types of services used in the framework.

The main contribution of this paper is a high‐level model of a system for context‐aware regulated services, which consists of environments (domains and spaces), contextual software components, entities and computing devices.

This paper aims to demonstrate that a policy-based middleware solution which facilitates the development of context-aware applications and the integration of the heterogeneous devices should be provided for ubiquitous computing environments. Ubiquitous computing targets the provision of seamless services and applications by providing an environment that involves a variety of devices having different capabilities. These applications help transforming the physical spaces into computationally active and smart environments. The design of applications in these environments needs to consider the heterogeneous devices, applications preferences and rapidly changing contexts. The applications, therefore, need to be context-aware so that they can adapt to different situations in real-time.

In this paper, we argue that a policy-based middleware solution that facilitates the development of context-aware applications and the integration of the heterogeneous devices should be provided for ubiquitous computing environments. The middleware allows applications to track items and acquire contextual information about them easily, reason about this information captured using different logics and then adapt to changing contexts. A key issue in these environments is to allow heterogeneous applications to express their business rules once, and get the preferred data once they are captured by the middleware without any intervention from the application side.

Our middleware tackles this problem by using policies to define the different applications’ rules and preferences. These policies can specify rules about the middleware services to be used, type of data captured, devices used, user roles, context information and any other type of conditions.

In this paper, we propose the design of a flexible and performant ubiquitous computing, and context-aware middleware called FlexRFID along with its evaluation results.

A decade and a half after the debut of pervasive computing, a large number of prototypes, applications, and interaction interfaces have emerged. However, there is a lack of consensus about the best approaches to create such systems or how to evaluate them. To address these issues, this paper aims to develop a performance evaluation framework for pervasive computing systems.

Based on the authors' experience in the Gator Tech Smart House – an assistive environment for the elderly, they established a reference scenario that was used to guide the analysis of the large number of systems they studied. An extensive survey of the literature was conducted, and through a thorough analysis, the authors derived and arrived at a broad taxonomy that could form a basic framework for evaluating existing and future pervasive computing systems.

A taxonomy of pervasive systems is instrumental to their successful evaluation and assessment. The process of creating such taxonomy is cumbersome, and as pervasive systems evolve with new technological advances, such taxonomy is bound to change by way of refinement or extension. This paper found that a taxonomy for something so broad as pervasive systems is very complex. It overcomes the complexity by focusing the classifications on key aspects of pervasive systems, decided purely empirically and based on the authors own experience in a real‐life, large‐scale pervasive system project.

There are currently no methods or frameworks for comparing, classifying, or evaluating pervasive systems. The paper establishes a taxonomy – a first step toward a larger evaluation methodology. It also provides a wealth of information, derived from a survey of a broad collection of pervasive systems.