Agent Handling with VR Technology and Spatial Programming for Information Aggregation in Plants

Nowadays the maintenance of production systems requires assistance of in formation technologies because of the decrease of expert workers We have presented remote maintenance mechanism which uses agents to diagnose facili ties in the factory But there is no distinguished mechanism and environment for automatic agent invocation We have proposed spatial programming for this purpose We noticed that those diagnosis processes are place dependent So in the spatial programming environment agents and its invocation process can be located as place dependent virtual object in the VR space And the VR space is linked to the real space and worker in the real space such as factory can get appropriate agents automati cally This paper describes how to implement spatial programming environment to realize ubiquitous maintenance by VR technology Introduction Recently in production systems the number of experts for facility maintenance decreases day by day So in the future we must succeed their skill and knowl edge using information technology The extracted skill and knowledge is very useful to make maintenance of facilities with information technology more e cient We have presented virtual community to establish remote maintenance environment Figure In this environment remote maintenance agents who can process and diagnose data from sensors on facilities are prepared in remote agent server and database These agents have maintenance skill corresponding to the human expert s ability Workers in the factory can use agents migrating from the server with some device The reason why we use agent is that mostly the data from sensors on facilities are very huge and those are con dential so data can not be transmitted externally so the only way is transmit program such as agent to the factory Waseda University Hibikino Wakamatsu ku Kitakyushu city Fukuoka Japan