Mobile work clearance management – challenges and solutions

Abstract

We present a system called MOSES, which is a mobile work clearance management system for complex and large-area industrial machines. Based on an extensive field study of current work clearance practices, we identified important challenges and developed several solutions. MOSES shows how an enterprise application, like an enterprise resource planning system, can be extended to improve occupational safety for maintenance personnel. The presented solution consists of a work clearance management extension for several existing enterprise resource planning systems and a mobile work clearance management for mobile devices. The paper also describes a framework called Smart Data Off The Spot (SmartDOTS) for building nomadic distributed enterprise applications that supports data replication and synchronization from various enterprise applications. The framework allows the modelling of business data, so that device-, network and task-specific data replication, and context-dependent network selection can be modelled and automatically be executed by the SmartDOTS framework. This paper shows the design and implementation of a prototypical mobile work clearance system, which uses the SmartDOTS approach.