Opportunistic and Location-Based Collaboration Architecture among Mobile Assets and Fixed Manufacturing Processes

Abstract

Research into integrating the concept of the internet of things (IoT) into smart factories has accelerated, leading to the emergence of various smart factory solutions. Most ideas, however, focus on the automation and integration of processes in factory, rather than organic cooperation among mobile assets (e.g., the workers and manufactured products) and fixed manufacturing equipment (e.g., press molds, computer numerical controls, painting). Additionally, it is difficult to apply smart factory and IoT designs to analog factories, because such a factory would require the integration of mobile assets and smart manufacturing processes. Thus, existing analog factories remain intact and smart factories are newly constructed. To overcome this disparity and to make analog factories compatible with smart technologies and IoT, we propose the opportunistic and location-based collaboration architecture (OLCA) platform, which allows for smart devices to be attached to workers, products, and facilities to enable the collaboration of location and event information in devices. Using this system, we can monitor workers’ positions and production processes in real-time to help prevent dangerous situations and better understand product movement. We evaluate the proposed OLCA platform’s performance while using a simple smart factory scenario, thus confirming its suitability.