Cabin as a Home: A Novel Comfort Optimization Framework for IoT Equipped Smart Environments and Applications on Cruise Ships

Abstract

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.

Cruise Tourism for Sustainability: An Exploration of Value Chain in Shenzhen Shekou Port

“…Nolich et al (2019) regarded the cabin as a home and introduced a novel comfort optimization framework for IoT-equipped smart environments and applications on cruise ships [38]. Nur et al (2019) discussed the revenue management in the cruise line industry [39].…”

A Cyber-Physical System to Detect IoT Security Threats of a Smart Home Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Node

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ComfOnt: A Semantic Framework for Indoor Comfort and Energy Saving In Smart Homes

“…Ploennings et al [22] provided a semantic model for the representation of thermal comfort, within a semantic framework aimed at automatized approaches for modeling cyber-physical systems. In [23] the authors tackled the modeling of some indoor comfort metrics by reusing some reference models to enable customization of comfort in cruise cabins; the ontology is here adopted as a backbone for an IoT framework aimed at monitoring and enhancing the cruise experience.…”