Using Spatial Abstractions in Industrial Environments

The invisible integration of technology in literally everything, which is the fundament of research on pervasive and ubiquitous computing, leads to huge quantities of smart objects which are distributed in physical space. They should operate autonomously, namely with as little human intervention as possible, and interact with humans in a more implicit way. Spatial properties and relations are important context information in this regard, as they allow them to automatically adapt to spatial changes in their environment in a semantically meaningful way. We propose novel concepts and a framework for exploiting qualitative abstractions of relationships between smart objects, which are specific to an application domain and facilitate the development of spatially-aware applications, and demonstrate their use with four industrial application scenarios.