An Indoor Navigation Ontology for Production Assets in a Production Environment

This article highlights an indoor navigation ontology for an indoor production environment. The ontology focuses on the movement of production assets in an indoor environment, to support autonomous navigation in the indoor space. Due to the fact that production environments have a different layout than ordinary indoor spaces, like buildings for office or residential use, an ontology focusing on indoor navigation looks different than ontologies in recent publications. Hence, rooms, corridors and doors to separate rooms and corridors are hardly present in an indoor production environment. Furthermore, indoor spaces for production purposes are likely to change in terms of physical layout and in terms of equipment location. The indoor navigation ontology highlighted in this paper utilizes an affordance based approach, which can be exploited for navigation purposes. A brief explanation of the routing methodology based on affordances is given in this paper, to justify the need for an indoor navigation