Distributed Architecture for Mobile Contextual Integrated Field Work Applications

Abstract

The current generation of corporate software tools & applications were not designed to support the unique needs of industrial field service work. Business software applications such as project management and time keeping, for example, are typically designed for traditional desktop computing office environments. As such, they assume low user mobility, high network availability and WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointer) user interfaces. These are also agnostic to physical environment context and are loosely integrated with one another, often requiring users to maintain duplicated information records. As a result, Field Services Personnel as Engineers, Superintendents and Craftsmen end up spending significant amount of their work time dealing with the consequences of these inefficiencies. In this paper, we describe a distributed architecture for mobile, contextual and integrated fieldwork software applications (or MCI) designed for mobile and wearable computing platforms. This software architecture defines a contextual and mobility-aware client side API, a flexible integration middleware, and instrumented backend services. We show how MCI can enable the construction of portable, mobile, context-aware and integrated software applications discussing its use in the implementation of Smart Outage, a mobile app used for automating common tasks in Field Engineering work.