Mobile Computing Support in Industrial Field Service Engineering

The increasing digitization of our daily lives is gaining a new momentum recently in what is called the post-desktop era of computing. This wide spread in digitization is made possible by the introduction of handy devices specifically of mobile phones, laptop computers, smartphones and tablets. These devices, in turn, operate on distributed systems and mobile networks, which enable mobility, ubiquity and interactivity of computers, data, software and users. This new trend in shaping up technological advancement presents new opportunities for mobile information presentation, processing and synthesis in different spheres of application such as industrial field services engineering. Industrial field service engineers execute sets of work orders on daily basis plans. These work order executions demand the availability of digital information anywhere anytime to minimize the average time required to accomplish them. In this context, the pervasiveness and ubiquity of mobile devices and smartphones creates a favorable possibility for industrial field service engineering automation. Most contemporary smartphones come out with abundant features to use for industrial field service engineering task automation and different ways of presenting information to service engineers. The objective of this thesis is, therefore, to develop a stable mobile prototype software by using Android smartphone hardware and software features to perform preparation, execution and post-processing of the work orders using latest digital technology available in smartphones, like camera, video, sound recording, annotations, maps and Augmented Reality (AR). The prototype enables service engineers to locate service fields, locate equipment, record work order events and report them for later use. The results of a usability field test carried out towards the end of the thesis work indicate that the prototype reduces the work order execution time by a considerable amount as well as giving the comfort of information presentation to service engineers. Analysis of the usability test of the project reflect that industrial field service engineers do need supportive tools based on smartphones and new technologies such as AR to assist them on daily basis works.Validerat; 20130816 (global_studentproject_submitter