Engineering crowd interaction within smart environments

Smart environments (e.g., airports, hospitals, stadiums, and other physical spaces using ubiquitous computing to empower many mobile people) provide novel challenges for usability engineers. Firstly, interaction can be implicit and therefore unintentional on the part of its users. Secondly, the impact of a smart environment can influence the collective or crowd behavior of those immersed within it. These challenges lead to requirements for complementary analyses which must be combined with the more typical focus on the interaction between user and device. The paper explores a family of stochastic models aimed at analyzing these features with a particular focus on crowd interaction.