Mapping Parallels between Outdoor Urban Environments and Indoor Manufacturing Environments

Abstract

Abstract:The concepts of "Smart Cities" and "Smart Manufacturing" are different data-driven domains, although both rely on intelligent information technology and data analysis. With the application of linked data and affordance-based approaches, both domains converge, paving the way for new and innovative viewpoints regarding the comparison of urban tasks with indoor manufacturing tasks. The present study builds on the work, who state that cities are scaled versions of each other, by extending this thesis towards indoor manufacturing environments. Based on their structure and complexity, these environments are considered to form ecosystems of their own, comparable to "small cities". This conceptual idea is demonstrated by examining the process of human problem-solving in transportation situations from both perspectives (i.e., city-level and manufacturing-level). In particular, the authors model tasks of human operators that are used to support transportation processes in indoor manufacturing environments based on affordances and spatial-temporal data. This paper introduces the fundamentals of the transformation process of outdoor tasks and process planning activities to indoor environments, particularly to semiconductor manufacturing environments. The idea is to examine the mapping of outdoor tasks and applications to indoor environments, and vice-versa, based on an example focusing on the autonomous transportation of production assets in a manufacturing environment. The approach is based on a spatial graph database, populated with an indoor navigation ontology and instances of indoor and outdoor objects. The results indicate that human problem-solving strategies can be applied to indoor manufacturing environments to support decision-making in autonomous transportation tasks.

Indoor Environments and Geographical Information Systems: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Tang and Ren (2012) represented, within a uniform framework, a GIS-based simulation model to generate an entire evacuation process automatically. Some studies (Chen et al, 2019;Schabus & Scholz, 2015;Schabus et al, 2017; focused on smart manufacturing, using GIS to perform indoor space analysis, allowing for understanding and optimization of the systems, data, and processes (Schabus & Scholz, 2015;Schabus et al, 2017). Scholz and Schabus (2017) worked on the construction of an optimal path calculation inside a manufacturing environment.…”

A Quaternion-Based Piecewise 3D Modeling Method for Indoor Path Networks

“…The results indicate that this quaternion-based piecewise 3D modeling method could improve the visualization performance of a 3D indoor path network by displaying paths with different shapes, textures and colors and that the method could maintain a high rendering efficiency in a 3D GIS scene. Therefore, the method proposed in this paper will have promising prospects for path analysis related applications in Digital Earth and Smart Cities [4,[17][18][19][20].…”