System for managing an industrial workflow

Abstract

A system for managing an industrial workflow including a plurality of asset tags, each tag associated with a corresponding asset, and a plurality of point of interest reader nodes, each reader node including at least one BLE radio in communication with a subset of the plurality of asset tags and a communications manager in communication with at least one cloud server. The system further includes a cloud server having a location services module, a process and workflow editor configured to enable a user to access a plurality of rules in a process flow library regarding how different types of assets are expected to move through a facility, and a real-time compute engine configured to generate a sequence of events for an asset and interpret the process and workflow plan to determine whether a trigger event has occurred.

What is claimed is: 
     
         1 . A system for managing an industrial workflow comprising:
 a plurality of asset tags, each asset tag associated with a corresponding asset;   a plurality of point of interest reader nodes for distribution in an industrial environment, each point of interest reader node comprising:   at least one BLE radio configured to receive data from a corresponding set of devices from a plurality of peripheral devices and the plurality of asset tags within a communication range;   a communications manager in communication with the at least one BLE radio and at least one cloud server data;   a cloud server comprising:   a location services module configured to determine locations for a group of assets based on known locations of a set of reader nodes of the plurality of point of interest reader nodes and based on data received via at least one BLE radio and the associated communications manager, wherein the data received is from a corresponding set of devices within the communication range of the at least one BLE radio;   a process and workflow editor configured to enable a user to access a plurality of rules in a process flow library regarding how different types of assets are expected to move through a facility and configured to enable a user to access a plurality of rules in a rules library regarding actions to take based on determined movements of the different types of assets and to generate a user defined process and workflow plan; and   a real-time compute engine configured to interpret the user defined process and workflow plan and to generate a sequence of events for an asset and to determine whether a trigger event has occurred based in part on one or more determined locations of the asset and data associated with peripheral devices at one or more of the determined locations.