Enhancement of industrial monitoring systems by utilizing context awareness

Current industrial monitoring systems gather big amounts of data which are provided to plant personnel for maintaining the proper function and desired production performance. Unfortunately, these systems do not take into account context as part of the plant, leaving out useful information that could be useful for personnel when they perform their everyday tasks. This context information includes data that are implicit to the system but is not measured, like the temperature of the room, location and time; and other system information that already exists but has not been integrated into the monitoring system, like 3D models and manuals. Therefore, there is a need for a monitoring system that integrates context data and existing plant information to provide dynamically only the most relevant information for users when it is needed. The information should be in the right modality based on the state of the system, user, environment and functionalities of the device used for providing the information. This paper presents a proposal for a context-aware industrial monitoring system. Its main characteristics, components, requirements and possible enabling technologies are presented. In order to illustrate the expected benefits of the approach, a representative scenario of the domain of discrete manufacturing is provided. Finally, feature and constrains are discussed and future steps are presented.