Search results
1 – 10 of 62Susanne Zimmermann-Janschitz, Simon Landauer, Sebastian Drexel and Jana Obermeier
The study aims to promote independent mobility for persons with visual impairment or legal blindness (VIB) by developing a Web-based wayfinding application using geographic…
Abstract
Purpose
The study aims to promote independent mobility for persons with visual impairment or legal blindness (VIB) by developing a Web-based wayfinding application using geographic information systems (GIS). While the literature mainly focuses on technical devices presenting results for wayfinding, a lack of integration of user needs is identified. The inclusive, participative developed application offers step-by-step directions for pre-trip planning through an accessible user interface.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper presents a semi-automated approach to extract a pedestrian routing network data set based on open government data and field survey. User profiles calculate different routes using a weighting scheme for landmarks, orientation hints, infrastructure of crossings and sidewalks. The adoption of ArcGIS Web AppBuilder widgets allows access of the user interface additionally through keyboard-only navigation and therefore screen-reader capability.
Findings
GIS offers a powerful tool to design network analysis for persons with VIB. The routing algorithm accesses different user profiles, returning individualized turn-by-turn directions. The complex set of attributes, including shorelines, landmarks and barriers, can be integrated by semi-automated processes.
Practical implications
The paper illustrates the benefit of GIS applications for wayfinding of persons with VIB to raise self-determination and independence.
Originality/value
A ubiquitous pedestrian sidewalk network for a medium-size city comprises a novelty, as research has mainly focused on small areas. The integration of shorelines next to a various number of hints, landmarks and potential barriers through semi-automated processes allows reproducibility and transferability of the model to other cities.
Details
Keywords
Laura Remes, Kenneth Dooley, Jaakko Ketomäki and Heikki Ihasalo
User-centred intelligent buildings (IBs) should respond to users’ needs holistically and the demand for end user applications is steadily growing. The purpose of this study is to…
Abstract
Purpose
User-centred intelligent buildings (IBs) should respond to users’ needs holistically and the demand for end user applications is steadily growing. The purpose of this study is to answer: What are end user applications, what should they be called, and what are their key features?
Design/methodology/approach
This is a mixed-method study. The authors have used different data sources, such as online research and interviews. In data processing, the authors have used word counting and Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling.
Findings
These end user applications can provide the missing user-centered elements of IBs. The authors have found that “smart workplace solution” (SWS) is the best term to describe these applications, and they also describe the key features, which include booking, showing free spaces, occupancy tracking, wayfinding and searching.
Research limitations/implications
As the end user applications are constantly and rapidly evolving, the latest evolving of such applications might not be covered. Furthermore, the authors have relied on companies’ information as given.
Originality/value
IBs have emerged over 20 years ago, and these are the first solutions that can be considered truly user-centered.
Details
Keywords
Jose Ignacio Tamayo Segarra, Bilal Al Jammal and Hakima Chaouchi
Internet of Things’ (IoT’s) first wave started with tracking services for better inventory management mainly using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. Later on…
Abstract
Purpose
Internet of Things’ (IoT’s) first wave started with tracking services for better inventory management mainly using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. Later on, monitoring services became one of the major interests, including sensing technologies, and then more actuation for remote control-type of IoT applications such as smart homes, smart cities and Industry 4.0. In this paper, the authors focus on the RFID technology impairment. They propose to take advantage of the mature IoT technologies that offer native service discovery such as blutooth or LTE D2D ProSe or Wifi Direct. Using the automatic service discovery in the new framework will make heterogeneous readers aware of the presence of other readers and this will be used by the proposed distributed algorithm to better control the multiple RFID reader interference problem. The author clearly considers emerging Industry 4.0 use case, where RFID technology is of major interest for both identification and tracking. To enhance the RFID tag reading performance, collisions in the RFID frequency should be minimized with reader-to-reader coordination protocols. In this paper, the author proposes a simple distributed reader anti-collision protocol named DiSim that makes use of proximity services of IoT network and is compliant with the current RFID standards. The author evaluates the efficiency of the proposal via simulation.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper, the author proposes a simple distributed reader anti-collision protocol named DiSim that makes use of proximity services of IoT network and is compliant with the current RFID standards. The author evaluates the efficiency of the proposal via simulation to study its behavior in very dense and heterogeneous RFID environments. Specifically, the author explores the coexistence of powerful static readers and small mobile readers, comparing the proposal with a standard ETSI CSMA method. The proposal reduces significantly the number of access attempts, which are resource-expensive for the readers. The results show that the objectives of DiSim are met, producing low reader collision probability and, however, having lower average readings per reader per time.
Findings
DiSim is evaluated with the ETSI standard LBT protocol for multi-reader environments in several environments with varied levels of reader and tag densities, having both static powerful RFID readers and heterogeneous randomly moving mobile RFID readers. It effectively reduces the number of backoffs or contentions for the RFID channel. This has high reading success rate due to the avoided collisions; however, the readers are put to wait, and DiSim has less average readings per reader per time. As an additional side evaluation, the ETSI standard LBT mechanism was found to present a good performance for low-density mid-coverage scenarios, however, with high variability on the evaluation results.
Research limitations/implications
To show more results, the author needs to do real experimentation in a warehouse, such as Amazon warehouse, where he expects to have more and more robots, start shelves, automatic item finding on the shelve, etc.
Practical implications
Future work considers experimentation in a real warehouse equipped with heterogeneous RFID readers and real-time analysis of RFID reading efficiency also combined with indoor localization and navigation for warehouse mobile robots.
Social implications
More automatization is expected in the future; this work makes the use of RFID technology more efficient and opens more possibilities for services deployment in different domains such as the industry which was considered not only in this paper but also in smart cites and smart homes.
Originality/value
Compared to the literature, the proposal offers the advantage to not be dependent on a centralized server controlling the RFID readers. It also offers the possibility for an existing RFID architecture to add new readers from a different manufacturer, as the readers using the approach will have the possibility to discover the capabilities of the new interaction other RFID readers. This solution takes advantage of the available proximity service that will be more and more offered by the IoT technologies.
Details
Keywords
Omid Maghazei and Torbjørn Netland
Although the industrial application of drones is increasing quickly, there is a scarcity of applications in manufacturing. The purpose of this paper is to explore current and…
Abstract
Purpose
Although the industrial application of drones is increasing quickly, there is a scarcity of applications in manufacturing. The purpose of this paper is to explore current and potential applications of drones in manufacturing, examine the opportunities and challenges involved and propose a research agenda.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper reports the result of an extensive qualitative investigation into an emerging phenomenon. The authors build on the literature on advanced manufacturing technologies. Data collected through in-depth interviews with 66 drone experts from 56 drone vendors and related services are analyzed using an inductive research design.
Findings
Drones represent a promising AMT that is expected to be used in several applications in manufacturing in the next few years. This paper proposes a typology of drone applications in manufacturing, explains opportunities and challenges involved and develops a research agenda. The typology categorizes four types of applications based on the drones’ capabilities to “see,” “sense,” “move” and “transform.”
Research limitations/implications
The proposed research agenda offers a guide for future research on drones in manufacturing. There are many research opportunities in the domains of industrial engineering, technology development and behavioral operations.
Practical implications
Guidance on current and promising potentials of drones in manufacturing is provided to practitioners. Particularly interesting applications are those that help manufacturers “see” and “sense” data in their factories. Applications that “move” or “transform” objects are scarcer, and they make sense only in special cases in very large manufacturing facilities.
Originality/value
The application of drones in manufacturing is in its infancy, but is foreseen to grow rapidly over the next decade. This paper presents the first academically rigorous analysis of potential applications of drones in manufacturing. An original and theory-informed typology for drone applications is a timely contribution to the nascent literature. The research agenda presented assists the establishment of a new stream of literature on drones in manufacturing.
Details
Keywords
Suvi Nenonen, Ruud van Wezel and Olli Niemi
This paper aims to explore smart facilities services in the context of university campus by aiming to understand how the service development processes can be classified.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore smart facilities services in the context of university campus by aiming to understand how the service development processes can be classified.
Design/Methodology/Approach
The qualitative study is based on literature review about smart facilities services and a case study about developing visualisation, data and smart service in one building in Finnish campus. The case study data were gathered by diverse methods and analysed by content analysis.
Findings
Three smart facilities service processes were identified: experience processes for users, data-based service processes and technology processes. All the processes require more than only technocratic approach.
Research Limitations/Implications
Single case study without longitudinal data gathering is not strong in terms of generalisation.
Practical Implications
The process classification can help different stakeholders to identify their role and tasks in smart facilities service development.
Originality/Value
The research aims to understand how to develop smart services in addition to more investigated topic what the services include.
Details
Keywords
Srinimalan Balakrishnan Selvakumaran and Daniel Mark Hall
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of an end-to-end simplified and automated reconstruction pipeline for digital building assets using the design science…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of an end-to-end simplified and automated reconstruction pipeline for digital building assets using the design science research approach. Current methods to create digital assets by capturing the state of existing buildings can provide high accuracy but are time-consuming, expensive and difficult.
Design/methodology/approach
Using design science research, this research identifies the need for a crowdsourced and cloud-based approach to reconstruct digital building assets. The research then develops and tests a fully functional smartphone application prototype. The proposed end-to-end smartphone workflow begins with data capture and ends with user applications.
Findings
The resulting implementation can achieve a realistic three-dimensional (3D) model characterized by different typologies, minimal trade-off in accuracy and low processing costs. By crowdsourcing the images, the proposed approach can reduce costs for asset reconstruction by an estimated 93% compared to manual modeling and 80% compared to locally processed reconstruction algorithms.
Practical implications
The resulting implementation achieves “good enough” reconstruction of as-is 3D models with minimal tradeoffs in accuracy compared to automated approaches and 15× cost savings compared to a manual approach. Potential facility management use cases include the issue and information tracking, 3D mark-up and multi-model configurators.
Originality/value
Through user engagement, development, testing and validation, this work demonstrates the feasibility and impact of a novel crowdsourced and cloud-based approach for the reconstruction of digital building assets.
Details
Keywords
Abstract
Details
Keywords
Abstract
Details