Proactive Location-based Services Research Articles

An Enhanced Hybrid LBS and Its Prototype for Supporting Backpackers in Beijing

With the development of economic and people's living standards, more and more people join the ranks of backpackers, which have brought a lot of pressures to the society. It's the emergence of an enhanced hybrid location-based services (LBS) to solve this problem. LBS are classified into three categories, i.e. Reactive LBS, Proactive LBS, and Hybrid LBS (H-LBS). The prototype of H-LBS for supporting backpackers in Beijing was discussed. There are several services to support backpackers by H-LBS, for example travel insurance services, tourism planning services, in which kernel density estimation was used to calculate the hotspots, and travel process support services.

PLBSD: a platform for proactive location-based service discovery

We introduce a platform for the rapid prototyping of proactive location-based service discovery, proactive location-based services are conceptualised along three broad categories: location-triggered services chain-triggered services, proximity-triggered services, and illustrated through a number of usage scenarios. We report on a workshop with designers and researchers in the area of location-based services that resulted in a set of initial requirements for the platform. We describe how the platform aims at addressing these requirements, and illustrate the implemented features through the development of a proactive location-based application.

Efficient proximity and separation detection among mobile targets for supporting location-based community services

Proximity and separation detection are high-level functions for supporting proactive location-based community services. Proximity detection automatically triggers an alert as soon as a pair of mobile target persons approaches each other closer than a pre-defined distance, while separation detection generates an alert when two targets depart from each other more than a pre-defined distance. For both functions it is necessary to permanently track the positions of all target persons joining the community and correlate their position fixes. To realize proactive proximity and separation detection, different strategies for exchanging position fixes between GPS-capable mobile devices and a central location server are presented in this paper. The goal of the strategies is to minimize the amount of messages exchanged at the air interface and thus to save valuable bandwidth, monetary costs the tracked targets have to spend for bearer services like GPRS, and battery consumption of the mobile devices. Furthermore, the paper presents the results of simulations that has been performed in order to compare the proposed update strategies and describes experiences achieved with a prototype implementation.