Beacon-Based Fuzzy Indoor Tracking at Airports

Abstract

An application of Bluetooth beacons is here proposed to perform real-time tracking of the locations and movements of airport staff through different monitored airport infrastructure elements, such as rooms, terminals or boarding gates. With respect to this, the aim is to provide an efficient location service of airport workers and users through an indoor tracking controller based on fuzzy logic. For this purpose, a mobile application and a Web service have been implemented. This location knowledge may be decisive while performing common airport procedures or managing airport resources, staff or emergency situations aiming at ensuring a short response time. Likewise, the proposed system integrates an operational module of coordination to facilitate the communications of users at the airport. Besides, particular attention has been paid to the security of communication between mobile devices and the Web service, both regarding secure authentication of users and protection of confidentiality of information exchanged between airport staff.

تقنیات المرشد اللاسلكی فی المقصد السیاحی المصری: المتطلبات والمزایا

“…The study findings also confirmed that i-Beacons enables the customer to interact directly with the provided tourism services, helps attract attention to unknown places and facilitates the visit by domestics and international tourists, helps cover any shortage of information and rare languages, contributes to creating new job opportunities in the field of information technology, gives tourism businesses the opportunity to provide the services and information needed by tourists in various languages, supports the tour guide in many languages and supports humans who can easily forget and leads to easy access to service and improvement of the tourism experience. The previous advantages come in line with Singh et al (2015), Toledo et al (2018), and Ferreira et al (2020. who confirmed that i-Beacons is considered one of smart marketing techniques offers a number of benefits including enhancing flexibility, good tourist experience, and suitability to complex intermodal transport networks, as well, giving tourist more details about the destination and gives him the opportunity to discover new destinations.…”

Beacon-Based Remote Measurement of Social Behavior in ASD Clinical Trials: A Technical Feasibility Assessment

“…Many systems have been developed that aim to estimate the location or activity of people during their everyday lives using sensors. Most common approaches are using GPS [ 5 ], Wi-Fi [ 7 , 23 , 24 ], cameras using computer vision [ 8 ], Bluetooth/BLE [ 9 , 10 , 11 ], ultra wide band (UWB) [ 25 ] and accelerometer sensors via dead reckoning [ 26 ] ( Table 4 ). GPS is efficient in outdoor location estimation, but not effective indoors.…”

“…For example, in the outdoor environment, GPS can be used to identify time spent in “social places” [ 5 ] and Bluetooth can be used to infer the physical proximity of people [ 6 ]. In the home environment, sociability may be characterized using Wi-Fi [ 7 ], cameras using computer vision [ 8 ], Bluetooth [ 9 , 10 , 11 ], or combinations of multiple sensors such as RFID and cameras [ 12 ]. Each technology comes with different challenges.…”

“…Firstly, cameras require an approach that preserves patient privacy which increases operational complexity, whereas RFID/Wi-Fi-based systems usually record the presence of a mobile sensor in relation to the different static RFID or Wi-Fi devices, increasing the system complexity of retrieving and combining the information from all devices for analysis. Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons, known mainly for applications in marketing [ 9 ], entertainment [ 10 ], airports [ 11 ], museums [ 13 ] or hospitals [ 14 ], do not have any of these constraints. BLE beacons transmit signals that can be recorded by one mobile sensor (e.g., a smartwatch), avoiding the need to clock synchronize all devices in the system, combine data recorded at multiple sources and do not transmit any personally identifiable data.…”

“…Other than the technology, another challenge we face is that a home setting is a much more dynamic environment compared to a shopping/entertainment center [ 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 ], given the smaller spaces, furniture placement, and variety of building materials used. Different homes have different layouts (e.g., very small rooms or open spaces), different materials used for the walls and furniture that have a different impact on the BLE beacon signal.…”