Improving the decision-making support in context-aware applications: The case of an adaptive virtual education learning management system

An application is context-aware if it uses context information to provide the user with relevant information or services. Generally, the process of making decisions about what information should be presented to the user taking into account a certain context is performed at design time. However, as the context usually changes during the execution of the system, the relevance of the information with respect to the context may be a ected while the system is running. Therefore, new approaches that take into account these dynamic changes during the decision-making process at runtime for context-aware applications are required. The authors of this paper argue that a decision-making process based on the runtime reassessment of context-based relevance can be used to improve the information or services provided to the user under uncertain conditions which were not totally foreseen previously. The services can be in the form of suggested system adaptations. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we present a novel case study from the domain of virtual education, which involves an adaptive context-aware learning management system. We demonstrate positive improvements to the autonomous decision-making support for this kind of systems.