OpenFactory: Enabling Situated Task Support in Industrial Environments

Combining an awareness of a worker’s physical environment with a model of their task enables a system capable of playing an active role in supporting workers in the environment. We discuss OpenFactory, a prototype system for industrial settings that demonstrates how data from low level components published as services can be provided in a situated manner to workers pursuing a variety of tasks. In the context of a maintenance scenario we explore how an industrial environment’s ability to sense its state and the resulting information can be used to augment collaboration both among workers as well as between workers and their environment. The benefits of this approach include improved accuracy on worker tasks, continuous regulatory compliance and increased flexibility of service delivery to the facility. In essence, for the worker OpenFactory represents a task-oriented interface to the facility.