Privacy-Preserving Human-Machine Co-existence on Smart Factory Shop Floors

Abstract

Smart factories are characterized by the presence of both human actors and Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) for the transport of materials. To avoid collisions between workers and AGVs, the latter must be aware of the workers’ location on the shop floor. Wearable devices like smart watches are a viable solution to determine and wirelessly transmit workers’ current location. However, when these locations are sent at regular intervals, workers’ locations and trajectories can be tracked, thus potentially reducing the acceptance of these devices by workers and staff councils. Deliberately obfuscating location information (spatial cloaking) is a widely applied solution to minimize the resulting location privacy implications. However, a number of configuration parameters need to be determined for the safe, yet privacy-preserving, operation of spatial cloaking. We comprehensively analyze the parameter space and derive suitable settings to make smart factories safe and cater to an adequate privacy protection workers.