Context-awareness in industrial applications: definition, classification and use case

Context-awareness is becoming increasingly important as it allows to adapt the functionalities and user interfaces of applications based on environmental conditions or user preferences. While contextual adaption already plays a significant role in areas like mobile consumer applications (B2C market), the industrial domain still lacks a proper discussion. This paper is going to define the term context in the industrial environment and proposes a framework for the classification of the industry-specific context types. Using this framework, the most common contexts are determined, and it is shown how this classification supports the implementation of context-aware systems by discussing a use case.