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Demand uncertainty is a concern and difficulty of primary importance for companies. In particular, it has an important impact on the optimal design of a supply chain network. For example, demand uncertainty forces to store products in warehouses close to customers (safety stocks), in order to react quickly to variations and meet customer expectations. In this work, we integrate the impact of demand variability in a location-inventory model. Extending previous results, we propose a new mathematical formulation to consider safety stocks and study their impact on the supply chain network design.

The purpose of this project is to conduct a cost estimate for an Arctic-capable surface combatant that will support future United States operations in the Arctic to meet national security objectives. The United States is at a pivotal point with respect to its role in securing its interests in the Arctic. The Arctic is rapidly transforming from a relatively isolated region to one of increased human access due to receding ice. The changes that will take place in the Arctic region, and the challenges and opportunities these changes will bring, demand greater attention from the United States and its partners around the world. After conducting a hybrid cost estimate, combining a parametric analysis of foreign Arctic surface vessels with an analogy approach based on the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, the United States Navy could acquire an Arctic surface vessel costing approximately $1.5 billion, roughly $300 million less than the current Arleigh Burke design. We recommend that the United States start building Arctic-capable surface vessels as soon as fiscally possible. Realistically, the United States should pair Arctic surface vessels with a more robust air, sub-surface, and unconventional warfare capability in the future to make the U.S. a more prepared Arctic nation.

This work concerns the global minimization of a prescribed eigenvalue or a weighted sum of prescribed eigenvalues of a Hermitian matrix-valued function depending on its parameters analytically in a box. We describe how the analytical properties of eigenvalue functions can be put into use to derive piecewise quadratic functions that underestimate the eigenvalue functions. These piecewise quadratic underestimators lead us to a global minimization algorithm, originally due to Breiman and Cutler. We prove the global convergence of the algorithm and show that it can be effectively used for the minimization of extreme eigenvalues, e.g., the largest eigenvalue or the sum of the largest specified number of eigenvalues. This is particularly facilitated by the analytical formulas for the first derivatives of eigenvalues, as well as analytical lower bounds on the second derivatives that can be deduced for extreme eigenvalue functions. The applications that we have in mind also include the H-infinity-norm of a linear dynamical system, numerical radius, distance to uncontrollability, and various other nonconvex eigenvalue optimization problems, for which, generically, the eigenvalue function involved is simple at all points., European Commission; Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK); Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA)-GEBİP (Turkish Academy of Sciences Young Scientists Award Program)

The daily scheduling of an operating theatre is a highly constrained problem. Consequently, it is difficult to find the best solution, or even high quality solutions, in a reasonable time. We have compared two models that take many of the constraints on human and material resources encountered in real life into account. The performance of these two models, using mixed-integer and constraint programming respectively, were compared to determine which coped better with these constraints.

Since supplier insolvencies are a major source of supply chain disruptions, scholars have continuously suggested managing supply chain risk management (SCRM) proactively in order to avoid their occurrence. However, business practice seems to fail with this task. This paper investigates antecedents which foster proactive SCRM implementation from a contingency theory perspective. As a major contingency we choose past supplier insolvencies as an indicator for the level of vulnerability of organisations and investigate inter-organisational, intra-organisational, and individual antecedents. By consulting supply chain management and management accounting literature, hypotheses are developed and tested via content analysis in 63 interviews with representatives from the automotive industry. The findings demonstrate that a mechanistic management control system, a rational cognitive style and relational buyer–supplier relationships have positive impacts on proactively managing supplier insolvency risks. Furthermore, past experience with supplier insolvencies has a moderating, though not a direct, effect on proactiveness. This research suggests that a holistic risk management approach is required to proactively mitigate supplier insolvency risk.

Logistics’ contribution to corporate performance has increased over recent years, particularly due to supply chain innovations. Opposed to common innovations focusing on the improvement of product or information flow, supply chain finance (SCF) targets the financial flow and allows buying firms and their suppliers to improve working capital and reduce costs. However, the adoption process of SCF is complex and rather unexplored in academia. This article provides an early step in building knowledge about SCF and in particular how firms adopt SCF, why they adopt differently, and what role suppliers play in the adoption process. The objective was therefore to close the gap between our knowledge on product and information flow oriented innovations and financial flow innovations along the supply chain, namely SCF. For this explorative research, we opted for an inductive multiple case study approach with six European firms. Based on our findings, four sets of propositions are posited and an extended SCF adoption framework is proposed revolving around the interrelated adoption processes of buying firms and their corresponding supplier bases.

Over the last few decades, rational health care management and, in particular, operating theater planning, has attracted increased attention from practitioners and from the scientific community. However, although the operating theater environment is clearly stochastic, the impact of this randomness has often been ignored. In practice, simple rules based largely on past experience (such as keeping a safety margin), are most frequently used when making plans for the operating theater. In this paper, we propose an approach to help rationalize, at a strategic decision-making level, the way in which stochasticity can be taken into account in operating theater management, to help in the sizing and in the allocation of capacity. The three main sources of randomness are considered: durations of operations, unexpected emergencies and blocking because of a full recovery unit. Based on the Markov theory, our tool enables several performance measures to be estimated. An operating theater manager can use our approach to make informed decisions and assess, for example, the disruption of the planning by emergencies, the waiting times for emergency patients, the impact of the recovery unit, or the distribution of the working time. In particular, our approach helps determine the number of operations that should be planned in order to keep expected overtime limited. The tool is described in detail, discussed, and applied to the illustrative case of a Belgian hospital.

In this paper, we present a bounding methodology that allows to compute a tight bound on the throughput of fork-join queueing networks with blocking and with general service time distributions. No exact models exist for queueing networks with general service time distributions and, consequently, bounds are the only certain information available. The methodology relies on two ideas. First, probability mass fitting (PMF) discretizes the service time distributions so that the evolution of the modified system can be modelled by a discrete Markov chain. Second, we show that the critical path can be computed with the discretized distributions and that the same sequence of jobs offers a bound on the original throughput. The tightness of the bound is shown on computational experiments (error on the order of one percent). Finally, we discuss the extension to split-and-merge networks and the approximate estimations of the throughput.

Identifying customer segments has been arousing interest in the literature for decades, for various reasons. This paper introduces a different way of segmenting customers in the retail sector based on shopping behaviors: unlike traditional criteria, our segmentation criterion lies on items that we recommend shoppers to buy in the future, these recommendations being defined on what other shoppers, who act similarly in terms of shopping basket, buy. Our approach is thus made of two steps: first, products to be recommended to each specific customer are determined and second, customers are segmented following these recommendations. A first analysis on real data has been performed and preliminary results are shown in this paper. A possible application lies in the area of targeted promotional material, for example advertising folders or brochures adapted for each segment.

Engineering interactive systems that are aware of the characteristics and constraints of the context of the user becomes challenging when several user’s profiles, platforms and environments are considered. In this sense the adaptation of user interfaces raises as an important approach for stakeholders aiming at implementing and providing systems whose user interfaces are usable, regardless of their context of use. In 2012 during the first CASFE workshop we discussed potential models, frameworks and practical applications that aim at supporting, facilitating and improving the development of adaptive and adaptable systems. CASFE’2013 aims at joining experts in the domain of context-aware adaptation in order to present and discuss its state-of -the-art.

The recent popularization of touch screen devices have brought to users the opportunity to use different devices to interact and to share content, while current advances in the mobile context brought new capabilities for systems to run on many devices while maintaining the system’s consistency. Those two factors combined pose new opportunities for re- searchers to explore how users can collaborate using an heterogeneous set of devices, that can include large tabletops, smartphones or e-readers. This paper starts the discussion on four challenges related to this context.

Designing accessible web sites and more generally Internet-connected devices remains a challenging task nowadays. A number of guidelines (such as the WCAG2) are now widely available and recognised. To better cope with the quickly evolving technological landscape, these guidelines are also being formulated in technology-neutral terms. However this is still leaving the user dimension largely implicit, which makes it difficult to understand exactly which kind of user a given website is hindering. This paper describes how to capture and use rational links between guidelines and user capabilities/impairments by combining a set of complementary models (user, task, user interface, guidelines). The process of building those accessibility rationales relies upon available user and guidelines ontologies and also on obstacle identification and resolution techniques borrowed from the requirements engineering domain. This resulting enriched guidance enables a number of interesting new scenarios to better help web developers, analyse guidelines or make comparisons between guidelines.

Ensuring responsive design of web applications requires their user interfaces to be able to adapt according to different contexts of use, which subsume the end users, the devices and platforms used to carry out the interactive tasks, and also the environment in which they occur. To address the challenges posed by responsive design, aiming to simplify their development by factoring out the common parts from the specific ones, this paper presents Quill, a web-based development environment that enables various stakeholders of a web application to collaboratively adopt a model-based design of the user interface for cross-platform deployment. The paper establishes a series of requirements for collaborative model-based design of cross-platform web user interfaces motivated by the literature, observational and situational design. It then elaborates on potential solutions that satisfy these requirements and explains the solution selected for Quill. A user survey has been conducted to determine how stakeholders appreciate model-based design user interface and how they estimate the importance of the requirements that lead to Quill.

In order to address challenges posed by different users conducting their interactive tasks on heterogeneous platforms and devices in various environments, this paper provides a computational framework to support the adaptation of the user interface of interactive systems. This framework consists of: a meta-model for understanding fundamental concepts required by adaptation, a reference framework for characterizing seven dimensions for conducting adaptation based on the meta-model, and a design space for consistently assessing the adaptation coverage. In this way, development phases are considered with a standard approach, a unified terminology, and an extensive catalog of techniques.

Context-aware adaptation of user interfaces have been investigated since the early 80's to provide mechanisms for stakeholders to propose, implement and execute adaptation, enabling users to efficiently interact with adaptive and adaptable applications. Today, adapting UIs according to the context of use becomes inevitable. Not only because users interact with applications from many distinct environments (platforms, devices and users' profile vary significantly), but also because such applications must provide a high usability level regardless of the contexts of use, efficiently adapting themselves according to the context. In this sense, Serenoa project proposes its 2nd workshop, to join experts in the domain of context-aware adaptation to exchange experiences, discuss current trends, promote approaches, and raise awareness for this field.

Web application development teams face an increasing burden when they need to come up with a consistent user interface across different platforms with different characteristics, for example, desktop, smart phone and tablet devices. This is going to get even worse with the adoption of HTML5 on TVs and cars. This short paper describes a browser-based collaborative design assistant that does the drudge work of ensuring that the user interfaces are kept in sync across all of the target platforms and with changes to the domain data and task models. This is based upon an expert system that dynamically updates the user interface design to reflect the developer's decisions. This is implemented in terms of constraint propagation and search through the design space. An additional benefit is the ease of providing accessible user interfaces in conjunction with assistive technologies.

Distributed User Interfaces: Collaboration and Usability presents an integrated view of different approaches related to Collaboration and Usability in Distributed User Interface settings, which demonstrate the state of the art, as well as future directions in this novel and rapidly evolving subject area: - Broadens the reader’s understanding of collaboration and usability issues on Distributed User Interface settings - Presents foundations and models regarding DUIs - Includes chapters on security and usability, and privacy and usability - Written by international researchers in the field of Distributed User Interfaces (DUIs), this book brings together important contributions regarding collaboration and usability in Distributed User Interface settings. Throughout the thirteen chapters authors address key questions concerning how collaboration can be improved by using DUIs, including: in which situations a DUI is suitable to ease the collaboration among users; how usability standards can be used to evaluate the usability of systems based on DUIs; and accurately describe case studies and prototypes implementing these concerns. Under a collaborative scenario, users sharing common goals may take advantage of DUI environments to carry out their tasks more successfully because DUIs provide a shared environment where the users are allowed to manipulate information in the same space and at the same time. Under this hypothesis, collaborative DUI scenarios open new challenges to usability evaluation techniques and methods.

Designing interactive systems for multiple contexts of use becomes a burden when the end user interaction takes place in distinct scenarios whose specific characteristics and constraints vary and must be carefully considered. Stakeholders face then two main challenges: they are not aware of what among several context information is significantly relevant to consider, or how to appropriately adapt the user interfaces according to the information considered. Furthermore, stakeholders cannot simply rely on existing UI editors once they usually do not provide enough support for adaptation. Thus, adaptation is often ignored, resulting in user interfaces that are only suitable for static and conventional contexts of use. To support the design of user interfaces that are properly adapted to their target context, this paper proposes a novel methodology to enhance sketching activities by proposing to the end user context-aware adaptation guidelines. This work aims at raising awareness about context-aware adaptation since the early stages of the UI design.

Distributed User Interfaces (DUIs) have recently become a new field of research and development in Human- Computer Interaction (HCI). The DUIs have brought about drastic changes affecting the way interactive systems are conceived. DUIs have gone beyond the fact that user interfaces are controlled by a single end user on the same computing platform in the same environment. This new interaction mechanism affects the way these novel systems are designed and developed. New features need to be taken into account from the very beginning of the development process and new models, methods, and tools need to be considered for the correct development of interactive systems based on Distributed User Interfaces. Therefore, the goal of this workshop is to promote the discussion about the emerging topic of DUIs, answering a set of key questions regarding their development: How current UI models can be used or extended to cover the new features of DUIs? What new features should be considered and how should they be included within the development process? What new methods and methodologies do we need to develop DUIs in a correct way following the quality standards for interactive systems?

This paper addresses the problem of modernizing graphical user interfaces of interactive applications by re-engineering their resource files in four phases: resource decompilation, which extracts resource files from the executable code of an interactive application; modeling the source user interface, which transforms extracted resources into a resource model; resource to user interface transformation, which transforms the resource model into a Concrete User Interface model, and forward engineering, which offers two alternatives: after editing the user interface model, a new interface could be generated or recompiled into a resource to be incorporated back. The paper motivates and details this re-engineering approach by focusing on methods and algorithms implemented in UsiResourcer, a software tool that reverse engineers MS Windows resource files into a Concrete User Interface Model for further process. A discussion on the generalization of the approach is also provided.

A User Interface Description Language (UIDL) consists of a specification language that describes various aspects of a user interface under development [1]. Fundamentally, accessibility means that peoples with different disabilities can use a specific product. Particularly, in order to be accessible, a user interface must be perceivable, operable, and understandable for users, including those with disabilities or functional limitations as visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities. User interfaces accessibility can be approached through usability. International organization for standardization (ISO) 9241-11 defines usability as the extent to which a product can be used by the specified users to achieve specified goals effectively, efficiency, and with satisfaction in a specified context of use [2]. Accessibility focuses on including people with disabilities as the specified users and a wide range of situations, including assistive technologies, as the specified context of use

The need for accessibility evaluation tools is motivated by several endogenous and exogenous reasons coming from the end user (the designer and the developer) and companies releasing information systems. Existing evaluation tools mainly concentrate on examining the code of Web pages: Web pages more and more frequently contain non-HTML parts that entirely escape from being treated by existing techniques. This is the case of the advanced human–machine interface (AHMI), a piece of software programmed in C/C++, used for controlling the advanced flight management system in the aircraft cockpit. Studying this new user interface (UI) requires a structured approach to evaluate and validate AHMI designs. The goal in this work is to develop an evaluation tool to automate the process of evaluating the AHMI. The method addresses: support of multiple bases of guidelines (accessibility or usability or both) on-demand (partial or total evaluation), with different levels of details (a presentation for developers and for those responsible for certifying accessibility). The method goes a step toward the automatic evaluation of UI containing non-HTML parts.

With the growing need for intelligent software, exploring the potential of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms for User Interface (UI) adaptation becomes an ultimate requirement. The work reported in this paper aims at enhancing the UI interaction by using a Rule Management Engine (RME) in order to handle a training phase for personalization. This phase is intended to teach to the system novel adaptation strategies based on the end-user feedback concerning his interaction (history, preferences…). The goal is also to ensure an adaptation learning by capitalizing on the user feedbacks via a promoting/demoting technique, and then to employ it later in different levels of the UI development.

En los ultimos anos han aparecido un gra numero de herramientas de wireframing destinadas especialmente al desino de sitis y paginas web. Un wireframe es una de las representaciones usadas en el diseno de interfaces graficas de usuario (GUI) que muestra la estructura de la interfaz (que controles se utilizan y como se disponen en el area de visualizacion) sin atender a detalles come colores o imagenes. En este trabajo presentamos una solucion basada en tecnicas de Ingenieria de Software Dirigida por Modelos (MDE) para generar codigo final de la implementacion de una GUI a partir de un wireframe. Las tecnicas MDE nos han proporcionado varias ventajas importantes como i) disponer de una representacion de lato nivel del conocimiento extradio en el proceso de ingenieria inversa aplicado a los wireframes, ii) independencia de este proceso de la herramienta wireframing usada y del toolkit de GUI destino, iii) no es necesario que la alineacion de los controls sea precisa y iv) la calidad del codigo generado mediante la obtencion de interfaces flexibles

In recent years, it has become widely accepted that optimal supply chain design depends on the type of product the chain is catering to. Moreover, as opposed to carrying one product type only, firms deliver a variety of both functional and innovative products in parallel, complicating product-to-supply chain alignment. In this manuscript, we analyze in detail a firm's optimal supply chain portfolio as a function of its product portfolio. Our results indicate that supply chain and product portfolio alignment holds the potential for tremendous cost savings. Due to the large number of factors influencing the optimal setup, however, profound quantitative analysis is required to exploit its full potential.

L'ordonnancement journalier du bloc opératoire est un problème complexe fortement contraint et présentant différents objectifs à optimiser. Dans cet article, nous cherchons, non seulement à minimiser le makespan, à minimiser le coût des heures supplémentaires, à maximiser les affinités dans la composition d'une équipe chirurgicale, mais aussi à équilibrer au mieux les spécialités dans lesquelles les infirmières vont travailler de telle sorte à ce que celles-ci acquièrent un maximum de compétences afin de faire face à un éventuel besoin opératoire imprévu et urgent. La prise en compte de ce dernier objectif constitue l'originalité principale de ce travail. Par ailleurs, nous avons utilisé la méthode multiobjectif e-constraint qui nous permet d'obtenir l'ensemble des solutions Pareto optimales.

Face aux profonds changements et contraintes sociales, sanitaires et budgétaires engendrés essentiellement par le vieillissement de la population, face à l’accroissement des dépenses en soins de santé, il est urgent de trouver des solutions alternatives pour répondre à ces différents enjeux du 21ème siècle. Les pouvoirs publics ont compris la nécessité de répondre à cette problématique et tentent de trouver des solutions. En Belgique, des appels à projets sont lancés, visant la mise en place de solutions permettant le maintien à domicile de personnes âgées fragilisées. A contrario, la Belgique, comparativement à la France, est très en retard dans la création de structures d’hospitalisation à domicile. Les hôpitaux connaissent de leur côté des problèmes d’engorgement ou problèmes de transfert vers d’autres institutions suite à un manque de places disponibles. Le financement des hôpitaux est basé sur l’activité réelle avec comme conséquence des durées moyennes de séjour qui diminuent sans cesse. L’hospitalisation à domicile apparait dès lors comme une des solutions envisageables. Un outil d’analyse multidimensionnel a été développé permettant de calculer notamment le taux de substitution de l’hospitalisation classique vers l’hospitalisation à domicile. L’ensemble des analyses globales et par pathologie permet de conclure qu’une part non négligeable des séjours sont candidats à un transfert vers l’HAD.

The daily scheduling of an operating theatre is a highly constrained problem. Consequently, it is difficult to find the best solution, or even high quality solutions, in a reasonable time. We have compared two models that take into account many of the constraints on human and material resources encountered in real life. The performance of these two models, using mixed-integer and constraint programming respectively, were compared on a real-life case to deter-mine which coped better with these constraints.

We study the location-inventory problem in three-level supply networks. Our model integrates three decisions: the distribution centers location, flows allocation, and shipment sizes. We propose a nonlinear continuous formulation, including transportation, fixed, handling and holding costs, which decomposes into a closed-form equation and a linear program when the DC flows are fixed. We thus develop an iterative heuristic that estimates the DC flows a priori, solves the linear program, and then improves the DC flow estimations. Extensive numerical experiments show that the approach can design large supply networks both effectively and efficiently, and a case study is discussed.

La gestion d'un bloc opératoire conduit à résoudre des problèmes complexes largement traités dans la littérature. Ces problèmes ont leurs spécificités, leurs contraintes, leurs variables de décision... Cependant, peu d'auteurs prennent en compte les contraintes relatives aux ressources matérielles et humaines et rares sont ceux qui appliquent leur méthode à des cas réels. Dans cet article, nous présentons un modèle multiobjectif basé sur la méthode ε-constraint. Ce modèle est destiné à constituer les équipes chirurgicales et à ordonnancer les opérations. Nous avons essayé d’optimiser cinq objectifs dont deux tout-à-fait inédits : la maximisation des préférences des membres de l’équipe chirurgicale et maximiser la diversité de compétences dans lesquelles exercent les infirmiers. Nous terminons cet article par une présentation de nos perspectives de recherche.

The performance evaluation of stochastic production systems is crucial to support managers decisions as well as challenging for researchers. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to analyze production systems with general assumptions : assembly/disassembly systems, general processing time distributions and finite storages spaces. The general distributions are first discretized by probability mass fitting, and the transformed system is then analytically modelled by decomposition. The system is decomposed into two station subsystems and the processing time distributions of the virtual stations are iteratively modified to approximate the impact of the rest of the network, adding estimations of the blocking and starving distributions. Decomposition allows to analyze large systems in a reasonable computational time (unlike exact models), and with good accuracy. Computational experiments show that the relative error is on the order of one percent, and less with buffer sizes larger than two. Moreover, as it allows a fine approximation of the blocking and starving time distributions, PMF seems to bring an improvement in the application of the decomposition technique.

Electronic sketching has received a recurrence of interest over the years and again nowadays within the mobile web context, where there are diverse devices, operating systems and browsers to be considered. Multi-platform (e.g. web-based) sketching systems can be constructed to allow users to sketch on their device of preference. However, web applications do not always perform equally on all devices, and this is a critical issue, especially for applications that require instant visual feedback such as sketch-based systems. This paper describes a user study conducted to identify the most appropriate response rates (expressed in frames per second) for end users while sketching. The results are expected to guide stakeholders in defining response parameters for sketching applications on the web by showing intervals that are accepted, tolerated, and rejected by end users.

Prototypes are essential tools for design activities for they allow designers to realize and evaluate ideas in early stages of the development. Sketching is a primary tool for constructing prototypes of interactive systems and has been used in developing low-fidelity prototypes for a long time. The computational support for sketching has been receiving a recurrence of interest in the last 45 years and again nowadays within the mobile web context, where there are diverse devices to be considered. The research reported on this paper aims at addressing issues on multi-platform collaborative sketching using a prototyping tool for user interfaces. The tool was built to aid the investigation on how designers sketch using many different devices and collaborate using their sketches during design sessions.

This article aims to investigate user preferences for extra-user interfaces (extra-UI), formerly known as meta-user interfaces. These are special user interfaces that allow the user to control or personalize the application's user interface. They are named “extra-user interfaces” because the application does not need it to work. Their main goal is the support of systems with several contexts, displays, devices, or platforms. The purposes and features offered by all the Extra-UI vary from one application to another. To create coherence between them, we defined a catalogue of 14 distribution primitives that are typically provided and classified into 4 categories: simple primitives, basic primitives, advanced primitives, and management operations. Based on this catalogue, a comparative analysis of the state of the art was conducted to identify which interaction styles have been properly used and to discuss the rationale behind these usages. From this analysis, we set up and conducted a comparative evaluation of user preferences by 14 participants testing 6 selected distribution primitives in 4 different interaction styles. The research outcomes exemplified that there were significant differences on user preferences between interaction styles with regards to experience level and primitive type.

Ambient intelligence implies the need for context-aware adaptation of user interfaces. This adaptation with respect to the context of use is applicable to a wide spectrum of interactive applications ranging from front ends of web services, information systems to multimedia and multimodal applications. Although the ultimate goal of this adaptation is always for the ultimate benefit of the end user, many approaches and techniques have been used to various degrees of experience and maturity that effectively and efficiently support context-aware adaptation. This workshop is intended to review the state of the art in this domain, while looking at a broad range of applications, to discuss positive and negative experiences of context-aware adaptation, and to come up with criteria and requirements for driving such adaptation.

An effective adaptation of user interfaces approximates technological benefits to the actual needs, wishes and requirements of end users. Today the significant heterogeneity of contexts of use, given mainly by the diversity of devices and the easier access to technology, enables an interaction from many distinct environments and covers different application domains and users’ profiles. However the majority of the applications currently available still rely in a conventional context of use, i.e. an able-bodied user, with a Desktop PC in stable environment. Thus several usability issues are often found, requiring a deeper investigation of how adaptation can be efficiently defined and analyzed regardless of application domains. This paper proposes a theoretical framework that considers dimensions of context and adaptation to support stakeholders in the specification and analysis of context- aware adaptation.

The EU-funded Serenoa Project (www.serenoa-fp7.eu) is creating a novel open platform for developing context- aware application user interfaces. Such user interfaces are aware of the changes in the context and can react to them in a continuous way. This includes adaptation to the user's devices, tasks, preferences and abilities, thereby improving the user's satisfaction and performance compared to traditional approaches to user interface design. An additional benefit is a reduction in the cost and development time for creation and maintenance of user interfaces.