Karl-Heinz Krempels

OntHoS — an Ontology for Hospital Scenarios

The goal of this paper is to present an ontology for hospital scenarios (called OntHoS). It was developed by a couple of research projects dealing with the application of agent systems in hospital scenarios. The aim of OntHoS is to establish a basis for a description of these scenarios and to facilitate their inter-operability. Therefore, we classify types of ontologies and approaches to ontology design, we focus on constructing a domain ontology and discuss the proceeding as well as the encountered problems. Finally, an overview about the future work is given, focussing especially on opening the scope to task ontologies for special project-specific purposes

Usability Evaluation of Mobile Passenger Information Systems

Public transportation becomes increasingly diverse because of innovation in transport modalities and a large number of service providers. For facilitating passengers’ comfort, intermodal passenger information systems are required, which combine data of different providers and transport modes. Therefore, context sensitive mobile applications are promising solutions to supporting passengers at every stage of their trip. Crucial for the success of these applications is their usability. In this paper, a prototype of an intermodal passenger information system is investigated in a usability evaluation and tested in comparison to the leading mobility application in Germany. Both iOS apps were evaluated with a questionnaire using the system usability scale (SUS) in a lab setting (n=20) and in a field test (n=20). Additionally, participants of the field test were interviewed retrospectively about app and setting. The user feedback was beneficial in learning about users’ expectations towards information retrieval procedure in and functionalities of a passenger information system. The usability evaluation basically revealed easy to improve usability problems, but also a trust issue and the need for a participatory component in public transportation, probably by integrating social media.

Directory-less indoor positioning for WLAN infrastructures extended abstract

Existing positioning approaches do not provide the required positioning accuracy for navigation systems in indoor environments. Novel approaches are based on pseudolites (pseudo satellites) which try to emulate GPS (Global Positioning System) satellites. Thus, conventional GPS receivers could be used, but the infrastructure becomes very expensive. Other approaches are based on tagged WLAN access points or GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) base stations with a central tag directory. When a user wants to determine its position, he queries the central server for the geo coordinate of its current access point or base station. Finally, the server delivers the corresponding coordinate. In this paper we present a directory-less approach based on broadcasted geo tags for positioning in existing WLAN infrastructures.

From Agents to Multiagent Systems

In the previous chapter agents and their properties have been introduced. In real-world business applications, it is assumed that the benefit of agent technology is reached by dynamic interaction of autonomous agents. This interaction and co-operation forms a multiagent system (“MAS”). The organization of agents within such systems is strongly related to organization theory. The specific flexibility of MAS arises from the ability to follow predefined structures or evolve structures from dynamic interaction. In this chapter, fundamental concepts and properties of MAS are introduced with special focus on interaction and communication, roles, and structures.

Product oriented integration of heterogeneous mobility services

Growing spontaneous mobility demand and decreasing affinity to automobile ownership in young generations require integrated concepts for intermodal mobility. Especially in areas with insufficient capacity coverage by traditional public transport, adding alternative services, e.g. car sharing, seems promising. Currently, customers have to combine different means of transportation manually by checking several information sources, creating a combined itinerary and booking several, mode specific tickets. This paper presents an information system architecture, the so-called Mobility Broker, a joint platform for mobility services that enables provider collaboration to offer travelers the best possible combined service. Mobility Broker combines heterogeneous mobility service data, like time tables and car sharing places, using standardized open interfaces and well-known methods of data integration. The combined information allows intermodal routing for generating combined itineraries. Furthermore, it allows to use one ticket for heterogenous travelings. By this simplification of access to intermodal travel, we aim to foster the integration of alternative public transport modes. Thereby, the heterogeneous mobility service product characteristics and related synergy effects determine the approach fundamentally.

Service Discovery in Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper proposes an approach for service discovery in wireless mesh networks called OLSR-mDNS which supports both routing and non-routing clients. Therefore, the multicast DNS (mDNS) protocol is encapsulated in optimized link state routing (OLSR) messages to make mDNS multi hop capable. In this approach we use distributed DNS-SD caches called service caches (SC) on wireless mesh routers. We present an architecture where routing clients and non-routing legacy clients, which connect via a mesh gateway with service proxy (SP), can also participate seamlessly in the service discovery process. We show a plug-in for an OLSR-daemon which is widely used in real world deployments. The measurements performed in the departments wireless mesh testbed are discussed with results and conclusions at the end.

Landmark-based navigation in complex buildings

Growing numbers of mobile devices in our daily life and their capability to fulfill challenging computational tasks raise the question about new application fields beyond well-established tasks. While outdoor navigation became a standard task for many mobile devices, indoor positioning and navigation is still in the research and development stage. Even though complex buildings require aided guidance for visitors, todays mobile hardware is not able to deliver a reliable indoor navigation system. In this paper we describe a novel information system for indoor navigation in complex buildings. Users are guided through the building by using images of the surroundings and textual instructions. We avoid hardware-based user positioning due to its known drawbacks. Instead, users are involved into the navigation process and complete missing information through recognized context and logical constrains of their surroundings. The human navigation process based on recognition of certain unique locations and visual clues is the foundation of this work. The proposed system is universally applicable without restrictions on navigation devices or existing hardware in the building.

Indoor navigation approach based on approximate positions

Until now navigation aids have primarily focused on outdoor scenarios, whether driving on highways or, more recently, walking through cities. These systems use the Global Positioning System (GPS) for position information. Indoor navigation however cannot rely on GPS data, as the signals do not penetrate building structure. Thus other techniques were developed to provide position information indoors, but most of them lack the precision of GPS. In this article the approach of an indoor navigation system based on imprecise position information is presented. To compensate the deficit of precision the position information is combined with a movement model. This movement model is automatically generated from the maps which are already required for navigation.

Business model framework to provide heterogeneous mobility services on virtual markets

Growing spontaneous mobility and decreasing affinity to automobile ownership in younger generations demand for an integrated service for intermodal mobility. In areas with lacking coverage of traditional public transportation, extending the coverage by integrating alternative services like car sharing, seems promising. Because of the very different nature, the collaboration between traditional public transport and emerging mobility services requires fundamental changes to business models. Current business models are designed under the assumption of separation and competition, which contradicts the idea of collaboration. Therefore, a restructuring of all main pillars of business models under the consideration of mutual interdependencies is required. This work defines such business model pillars and contributes a business model framework for providing different mobility services on centralized virtual markets. Basis is a joint platform which enables collaboration between multiple services to provide a collective intermodal mobility service to the customer.

Agent.Hospital — a Framework for Clinical Applications in Agentcities

Agent.Hospital is an open agent-based (software) framework for distributed applications in the healthcare domain. Previous appropriation of the Agent.Hospital development is the application and examination of agent technology in a realistic business scenarios and the identification of further research needs. This paper introduces the framework developed by the German Priority Research Program 1083. We describe the initial system concept, currently implemented or specified functionalities and the integration of FIPA standardization activities. The example scenario, “clinical trials”, illustrates how Agent.Hospital supports distributed clinical processes as well as further research of agent technology