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The principal purpose of this paper is to determine the distinguishing characteristics of the factors that affect the successful adoption of ubiquitous computing technology (UCT) in supply chain management (SCM) in different settings.

Based on the relevant literature, this paper analyses the adoption of UCT in SCM operations, and describes the series of shaping processes. These processes are influenced largely by management and technical factors such as strong support from top management and by convenient user interfaces in global ubiquitous computing settings. These two factor types (management and technical) support the formulation of a theoretical framework that can be examined in two national environments (UK and Korea).

The results highlight the key differences in terms of UCT adoption in supply chain contexts between the two national environments examined, and indicate that these differences are affected by the different national industrial foundations, organizational network infrastructures, and perspectives on system development, as well as by issues related to the costs and practical benefits of using this technology in SCM.

This study raises some major implications for researchers and practitioners alike. Specifically, the paper stresses the role of management and technical issues in terms of UCT adoption in SCM operations, and expands current theoretical understanding of the subject. It also provides a set of management implications, including the need for managers to have strong support from top management and the need for a convenient user interface.

There is a scarcity of papers in SCM that examine issues related to ubiquitous computing. This is addressed via the current paper that reports the results of a comparative study of UCT implementation in SCM operations for firms operating in two national environments (UK and Korea). The paper will be beneficial to the strategic thinking of supply chain managers and will support further empirical research work in this academic field of study.

User-oriented seamless service handoff is prosperous in the ubiquitous computing environment. This paper aims to present an open architecture for the user-oriented seamless service handoff across heterogeneous platforms. The migration of service environment is the key to implement the user-oriented service handoff. A distributed service handoff scheme based on the binary sensor network and context-aware middleware has been proposed.

To validate this scheme, a test-bed has been constructed in the lab environment.

The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can reduce the service handoff delay compared to the centralized scheme.

The experimental results show that the scheme can reduce the delay of service handoff compared to the traditional centralized scheme.

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.

Taking into account the importance of e‐commerce and the current applications of AI techniques in this area, this research aims to adequate the design of a multi‐agent system for the provisioning of e‐services in u‐commerce environments. This proposal is centred on the methods of evaluation in a u‐e‐commerce environment.

The multi‐agent systems (MAS) approach is based on an MAS model developed for AmI that has been redesigned to support u‐commerce. The use of a recommendation system, previously developed by the research group, is suggested for this MAS. The methodological proposal centres on the evaluation of this type of system.

The evaluation of this type of system is the principal problem of current research. Therefore, this is the main contribution of the paper.

The different evaluation methods that are proposed, whether qualitative or quantitative, offer the possibility of measuring the added value that the context can give to the use of e‐services in different domains of application. Qualitative evaluation should consider the customer as a central piece in the system. In addition, quantitative methods should objectively evaluate the contribution of context to the application.

At present, there is no single method for evaluating the benefits of different u‐commerce systems, so a new method needs to be found based on these techniques.

The research proposes an MAS designed for u‐commerce domains, analyzes the capacity of trust management techniques in this environment, and proposes several evaluation methods to show the benefits of context information in the use of e‐services. Several real developments are described to show the different applications of MAS in u‐commerce and how evaluation is carried out.

The purpose of this paper is to describe some of the methodological challenges of investigating privacy and ubiquitous computing in the home, particularly among the healthy elderly.

The paper is based on focus groups with 60 senior citizens either living independently or in an assisted living facility. Prototypes of home‐based ubiquitous computing devices were created and deployed in a home‐like living lab setting; elders were brought to the lab to interact with the prototypes, then brought together in focus groups to discuss their insights and concerns.

Initial analyses suggest that extant metaphors of privacy may be inadequate for understanding pervasive computing in the home. Concepts of data, affective concerns, and the creation of appropriate prototypes for eliciting privacy are considered. Considerations for future studies of the elderly and privacy are made.

The homogeneity of the study population in terms of socioeconomic status, location, and community networks suggests that the study needs to be repeated with wider populations.

Although a number of projects and studies have examined the usability of home‐based ubiquitous computing and design for aging, there has been little integration of privacy and ethical concerns into general research discourse.

This study seeks to examine the concepts of context, context‐awareness, and context‐awareness technology needed for applying context‐awareness technology to the next‐generation of digital libraries, and proposed context‐aware services that can be applied to any situation by illustrating some library contexts.

The paper investigated both theoretical research and case analysis studies before suggesting a service model for context‐awareness‐based libraries by examining the context, context‐awareness, and context‐awareness technology in depth.

This paper derived possible library services which could be provided if context‐awareness services are implemented by examining and analyzing case studies and systems constructed in other fields. A library‐applied context‐aware system could recognize users entering the library and provide optimal services tailored to each situation for both new and existing users. In addition, the context‐awareness‐based library could provide context‐awareness‐based reference services, context‐awareness‐based loan services, and cater to other user needs in the stacks, research space, and a variety of other information spaces. The context‐awareness‐based library could also recognize users in need of emergency assistance by detecting the user's behavior, movement path, and temperature, etc. Comfort or climate‐control services could provide the user with control of the temperature, humidity, illumination and other environmental elements to fit the circumstances of users, books, and instruments through context‐aware technology.

Next‐generation digital libraries apply new concepts such as semantic retrieval, real‐time web, cloud computing, mobile web, linked data, and context‐awareness. Context‐awareness‐based libraries can provide applied context‐awareness access service, reactive space according to the user's access, applied context‐awareness lobbies, applied context‐awareness reference services, and applied context‐awareness safety services, context‐awareness‐based comfort services and so on.

Real instances of libraries applying context‐aware technology are few, according to the investigative results of this study. The study finds that the next‐generation digital library using context‐awareness technology can provide the best possible service for the convenience of its users.

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.

Pervasive computing environment allows the users to access the services anywhere and anytime. Due to the dynamicity, mobility, security, heterogeneity, and openness have become a major challenging task in the Pervasive computing environment. To solve the security issues and to increase the communication reliability, an authentication-based access control approach is developed in this research to ensure the level of security in the Pervasive computing environment.

This paper aims to propose authentication-based access control approach performs the authentication mechanism using the hashing, encryption, and decryption function. The proposed approach effectively achieves the conditional traceability of user credentials to enhance security. Moreover, the performance of the proposed authentication-based access control approach is estimated using the experimental analysis, and performance improvement is proved using the evaluation metrics. It inherent the tradeoff between authentication and access control in the Pervasive computing environment. Here, the service provider requires authorization and authentication for the provision of service, whereas the end-users require unlinkability and untraceability for data transactions.

The proposed authentication-based access control obtained 0.76, 22.836 GB, and 3.35 sec for detection rate, memory, and time by considering password attack, and 22.772GB and 4.51 sec for memory and time by considering without attack scenario.

The communication between the user and the service provider is progressed using the user public key in such a way that the private key of the user can be generated through the encryption function.

With rapid advances in wireless portable devices, ubiquitous computing seems becoming a reality everyday. The paper aims to explore the possibility of offering real‐time content adaptation on set of data streams using the active pervasive network infrastructure.

With different relative importance among the data sets, traffic control and discrimination with different operations on content adaptation are examined. Piggyback extension to users' preferences messages is proposed to smoothly enhance the active pervasive network infrastructure design.

Content adaptation is achieved transparently to both clients and server systems. Real‐time delivery services overcome stochastic network situations and abruptly changing bottleneck link bandwidth problem while retaining information integrity and preserving critical data at the best of the limit of an environment.

The paper explores real‐time content adaptation on data streams using the active pervasive network infrastructure.