Decision Support System Based on Indoor Location for Personnel Management
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper presents a system for the detection of the location in indoor environment using Bluetooth Low Energy devices, also taking into account the preservation of the privacy.
I think that work must be improved by addressing the following overall topics:
- The "Introduction" should better specify the background and explain the positioning of the system proposed (e.g., analyze previous implemented systems for the indoor location, and describe the main objectives achievable from implementation of the proposed one)
- The paragraph 4, called "DSS in practice", seems the system configuration (as correctly indicated by one of the sub-paragraph) to use the location as key element in a potential DSS; also, the sub-paragraph "Assign activities" appears too generic.
- Also, for the "Conclusions" my suggestion is the same, I think need to better discuss the objective of the work and the advantages produced by the proposed system, in order to explain to the reader the advancement due to its implementation in a DSS.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The Letter "Decision Support System Based on Indoor Location for Personnel Management" is a interesting document that explains a proof of concept on indoor locations based on Bluetooth Low Energy devices.
The document is well written, with a sufficient level of detail and the graphics are very appropriate. The positioning uncertainties that this method has have also been sufficiently documented, in my opinion.
I suggest that the authors explain in more detail the novelty of this proof of concept compared to the previous literature, adding bibliography required. In my opinion this point is not detailed enough.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The instruction is too general, it is suggested to improve it focusing better and in detail on previous studies that represent the state-of-art of the research. The same for the methodological framework of the research: it is suggested to divide paragraph 1 in two, to better integrate both these aspects.
It is suggested to detail the conclusions, in order to focus the aim of the research, its perspective of application and development in a more technical way.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
This paper introduces a DSS based on Indoor Localisation of the personnel satisfying privacy according to current legislation. Although the paper deals with a key aspect of localisation, I have a few concerns about this contribution.
1- The introduction only briefly describes the current work. What are the main motivations and objectives of this work. What is the gap authors try to contribute? Also, I miss a detailed list with the novel contributions of this work.
2- There is no related work section. Indoor localization and privacy are hot research topics. I miss a detailed comparison of what has been already done, highlighting your main contributions to the topic.
3- The positioning proposed based on triangulation is so simple. Even in optimal indoor scenarios the RSSI readings are not stable, having significant fluctuations over the time. Some works have already dealt and proposed robuster solutions. However, in this work, positioning relies on a very basic formula that does not consider those fluctuations and ways to mitigate this phenomena. I would recommend to consider to use more robust methods like fingerprinting, weighted centroid, or even advanced deep learning.
4- The authors depicted four basic scenarios, but more complex ones are not considered. In some realistic challenging indoor setups, it might be hard to get statistically different RSSI values in distances close than a few meters.
5- The core of the document is the part introducing the privacy preservation. Despite this part is so relevant, I found that some concepts are not fully clear or, even, undefined. When the author states "The prover wants to show that it is m integer units away from the target location, i.e. m is in the {a,a+1,··· ,b}range." What does a and b mean? Does a and b relate to a and b (and c and d) from the previous image? I would ask authors to provide more details allowing research reproducibility of the proposed method.
6- Similarly, some parts related to Section 4 need clarification. The example of possible scenario is appreciated, but what about providing empirical results? I really miss a metric providing an assessment of how your system is operating? Are the approximate locations proofs enough for personnel management? This is probably my major content on this paper, and empirical results will be more than welcome.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The new version of the manuscript appears significantly improved.
Reviewer 3 Report
The revision is good and sufficient
Reviewer 4 Report
The authors have done a remarkably effort to clarify my major concerns about the letter. The introduction with related work has been improved and more works (including a very recent one) are now referenced.
Probably, I would have updated the literature review. Indoor Positioning with BLE is gaining some interest because of the limitations imposed by Google and Apple to Wi-Fi fingerprinting. Many recent works are dealing with BLE with no mention to privacy/security. Other authors are identifying the potential problems of smart devices (including smartphones and wearable devices) with respect to privacy/security.
Minor:
"different techniques such as fingerprints" --> "different techniques such as fingerprinting" (
