Using proximity relations for the adaptation of mobile field services

We describe the use of proximity relations for enhancing a service platform regarding the support of context-aware mobile business-to-business and business-to-employee processes. Such relations constitute a special type of spatio-temporal context which is assumed to be produced by a configurable set of different sensing systems. We propose a networked service (context engine) to which the context data is delivered for further processing and for making the data accessible to other services and applications of the software platform through various interaction modes. As will be seen, a mobile business processes can be optimized in various ways (e.g., acceleration or reduction of occurrences of errors during the process execution) through this. The service-oriented wrapping results in the key advantage that the underlying context-sensing (i.e., tracking) technology can be easily exchanged without affecting the rest of the system or -- even worse -- the process. As an application of the concepts, we describe a setup in which the proximity of an assembly (or a respective part of it) to be maintained and the mobile worker doing the maintenance is used to configure the services in the service platform.