The international tourism competition poses new challenges to the cruise sector, such as the achievement of the tourists’ satisfaction and the increase in on board comfort. Moreover, the growing sophistication of tourists’ needs leads to a more user-centric touristic offer. Consequently, a personalized cabin environment, which fits the users’ activities and their characteristics, could be a plus value during the cruise vacation. These topics, however, are strictly connected with the diffusion of digital technologies and dynamics, which represent the tools to achieve the goal of a customized on-cruise experience. This paper presents E-Cabin, a novel Internet of Things (IoT) framework architecture that has at its core a reasoning system tuned on data gathered from the environment and from each specific passenger and the activities he/she performs. The framework leverages on knowledge representation with ontologies and consists of a publisher–subscriber communication framework that allows all of the IoT applications to use the reasoner and the provided ontologies. The paper demonstrates the proposed system in a demo cruise cabin where, by using the E-Cabin application, it is possible to set various atmospheres based on the users and activities occurring in the cabin.

Business traveling is attracting growing attention due to the expansion of international markets. This fact calls for an increasing attention of the tourism sector toward the needs of business travellers, who often require services that are different from the ones desired by leisure tourists. The application of smart solutions coming from Context Awareness and Ambient Intelligence aimed at promoting guests' comfort and well-being, also in cases in which they have special needs, represents a promising solution to tackle business travellers' requirements and thus, to increase hotels attractiveness and incomes. In this context, this work introduces RoomFort, a smart comfort management system aimed at enhancing comfort of hotel room guests and leveraging on semantic representations of comfort, environment, and sensors. RoomFort provides a set of domain ontologies to formalize comfort-related metrics and to exploit the automatic reasoning capabilities provided by Semantic Web technologies, while gathering data through a network of sensors to ensure guests are provided with tailored comfort profiles during their stays in the hotel. Particular focus has been placed on visual comfort, since indoor lighting features constitute one of the main factors influencing the two main activities that most business travellers accomplish in their hotel room: working and relaxing.

No abstract