Mobile Applications for Industrial Environmental Protection

Abstract

The paper focuses on the conception and development of mobile software applications to assist small and medium sized enterprises (SME) in the field of industrial environmental protection. The goal is to support SME in collecting data that might be relevant for environmental protection purposes. In this project which is supported by the German federal ministry of education and research a software architecture is currently developed. This software enables the communication and data exchange of a (central) desktop application in combination with small mobile clients, such as smart phones. The desktop application provides central management, analysis and export functions. The mobile applications are problem-oriented and designed as simple as possible to accomplish their specific data acquisition task. For a better understanding two examples of mobile applications in this context are given. The first example deals with the task of data collection of water and energy meters. The second example covers the aspect of legal compliance by providing a software support for the planning and documentation of maintenance works on cooling devices. In this context the biggest challenges in mobile development such as the choice of the optimal mobile device, the right operating system or the bidirectional synchronization of contents are highlighted and discussed.