Privacy-preserving self-localization techniques in next generation manufacturing An interdisciplinary view on the vision and implementation of smart factories

Abstract

Future manufacturing processes have to be highly adaptive and transformable in order to support short product life cycles and highly customized products. For an implementation of such a flexible, so-called smart factory, which is driven by a massive proliferation and usage of tiny embedded, context-aware information and communication technologies, many challenges - technical and social ones - have to be addressed. We identify major problems and focus on the location of objects and persons within manufacturing environments as an enabling key technology. Existing methods and possible solutions are evaluated and discussed. Thereby, we focus on the crucial aspect of privacy for workers when location systems are utilized. We also present a semi-automatic positioning approach that solves the discrepancy of guaranteeing the privacy of persons and highly accurate location tracking.