Future Directions on Enhanced Positioning Services with Predictions for Smart Factories

Efficient indoor positioning of the industrial devices is a key pillar of the digitalized factories. In 5G/6G era, the integration of positioning, the network communication and the environmental information is important to enhance the accuracy and performance for various use cases. In this direction, there is a need of a unified framework that is able to aggregate knowledge about device positioning from multiple systems and provide value added services for the vertical industries to realize their use cases. In this paper, we propose a positioning service function that combines the relevant information gained from different sources for providing enhanced positioning services with predictions. In addition, this paper presents a methodology based on Asset Administration Shell (AAS) to implement the proposed functionalities. The proposed approach outlines future direction on enhancing positioning services in smart factories to improve network and service management. We further illustrate our suggested way forward through a smart manufacturing use case.