Project WINS@HI

Abstract

Despite prevalence of on-going scientific and technical efforts in connecting anything everywhere in the mobile communication research landscape, there are still needs of agile and reliable solutions in local area where no mobile communication like GSM/UMTS is available or where local radio network such as Wi-Fi is not suitable.

In this project, we offer an ad-hoc, agile and reliable communication solution for both condition monitoring of the operations and safety of the workers in hazardous ‘Industry 4.0’ work environments in order to prevent unpredictable operation failures and work accidents. For this purpose, different kinds of Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors, such as wearable devices, that capture data from work environment and vital parameters of work safety will be exploited which could extract maximum amount of information from the hazardous production sites.

The proposed solution will focus on underground coal mines and tunnel/underground transportation construction sites as the main application field since these work environments are very good examples of hostile ‘Industry 4.0’ production sites where radio communication is very challenging. Therefore, safety and operation management in mines will be improved and mine accident risks will be evaluated more accurately owing to wearable sensors that collect information such as vibration and heat from mining equipment as well as gases like methane, firedamp and carbon monoxide from mine galleries. These sensors will also enable failure prediction for continuous operation, tracking of health status and physical location of workers which will guide search and rescue units in case of emergency.

Handling issues as the interoperability of IoT sensors, real-time complex event processing for event recognition and generation of new digital services will be addressed. Localization and tracking of the monitored objects or workers in such hostile environments using an ad hoc method will be a key component of our solution.

Moreover, the end to end outworked solution will focus on real-time-ability, quality and reliability of the communication links but also on low energy consumption using energy harvesting technologies. Last but not least, the proposed solution will avoid cost intensive installation efforts and will be easy deployable.