Spatial relationship definition
Define and monitor physical relationships between real-world objects via the interaction of their spatial properties
Summary
Object types can be assigned one or many spatial properties (3D spaces) in order to represent important geometric characteristics of the object. These could be fixed spaces around a set of workstations or 3D zones which move with the object wherever it goes, i.e. when the location of the object changes the location of the space changes with it.
Spatial relationships indicate the containment relationship between pairs of spaces. When the spaces of two different objects come together so that the 3D extent of one space completely encloses the 3D extent of the other, this fully-enclosed state between the two objects causes their containment relationship to become "true". When the objects move such that the 3D extents of the spaces no longer intersect at all, the containment relationship becomes "false". This "positive-containment, negative-overlap" behavior allows containment relationships to be stable when objects move about right on the edge of containment, avoiding multiple triggering of behavior.
Where an application has chosen to subscribe to events from a particular spatial relation, containment events provide the application with a very reliable, real-time handshake between two objects which can be used to drive connected systems and processes. Spatial relations turn locations (most of which are not interesting to business systems) into software-defined identifications, triggered by the spatial interactions between objects. These significant changes in state will only be triggered by a small fraction of sensed object locations.
Spatial Property Editor
SmartSpace provides an easy-to-use configuration client for defining the 3D geometries of the spaces owned by types and objects. This is a drag-and-drop interface which allows the user to define simple polygons around objects using mouse clicks.
Spatial Relationship Editor
The SmartSpace configuration client exposes an interface for defining which containment relations are actually of interest for the application. There may well be many possible containment permutations that are not actually of interest the application being configured, so it is necessary to explicitly request monitoring of the relationship between two spatial properties.
Spatial Monitoring at Runtime
At runtime the spatial relations that have been defined and the interaction events that are detected are available as real-time events for consumption by higher-level components (such as Business rules) or to be forwarded to external systems through one of the SmartSpace integration APIs or interfaces.
The spatial monitoring feature of SmartSpace is important as it acts as a filter between the noisy, very high bandwidth, low latency location data being generated by underlying sensor systems and the slower response, lower bandwidth information systems SmartSpace connects to. By turning high volumes of real-time location events into a few reliable and actionable business- and context-specific events, spatial monitoring converts sensed location data into a form that business systems can use.