Context–aware Integration of Collaboration Services for the Support of Mobile Field Operations

Abstract

This paper describes concepts for using contextual information in an advanced service environment for the support of mobile maintenance processes. We focus on spatio-temporal context data which is generated by a configurable set of different sensing systems providing positioning and proximity data. We devise an engine offering flexible interfaces to process the acquired raw data and making it accessible to other services and applications of the software platform through various interaction modes. The service-oriented wrapping of this functionality results in the key advantage that the underlying context-sensing (i.e., tracking) technology can be easily exchanged without affecting the rest of the system or – even worse – the process. The benefit of utilising contextual information wrapped via such engine stems from the fact that a maintenance process can be accelerated and occurrences of errors resulting in incorrect executions of procedures can be reduced. We illustrate the use of the system in a setup in which the location of an assembly (or the respective parts of it) to be maintained will be acquired through electronically tagging those objects.