MASP - Technology for Collaboration, Support and Inclusion in Engineering Processes

In Modern FActory buildings, nomadic technicians responsible for maintenance or for checking manufacturing state along the production line are often confronted with complex work-pieces and problems, which demand from them high domain knowledge, espsecially to deal with unpredictable occurences. Because these activities are conducted far from office facilities, a portable computer in the toolbox could be very helpful in provide in-hand relevant supporting material. With a wireless communication network, a mobile technician could also remotely access updateted product data or process plan, and eventually have a teleconference with a design engineer about hte configuration of a machine or a problem in the assembly process. Above all, a positive inclusion of individual expertise, and the integration of post-design activities into a product development process would be achieved, with great prospects for reaching a better product quality and process efficiency. In this papr, an innovative processing and communication apparatus is presented, and software tools for collaboration are described. These tools have been developed within the project MASP with the goal to support the further integration in a developed process. The development challenges concern ergonomic issues raised by the application context, the need of user interfaces aware of users with different abilities and locations, and teh performance limitations posed by a wireless mobile platform for the handling of large amounts of data and information.