TECHNOLOGIES FOR MANAGING FIELD-UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING - ENABLING FIELD-UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING

摘要

Over recent years, in line with the new IT evolution trend, more and more network infrastructure is being installed as a key infrastructure for society. Thanks to this network environment, the concept of "ubiquitous" has emerged as one of the new paradigms in technological trends. The word "ubiquitous" means ever present or occurring everywhere. In other words, ubiquitous means utilizing information in a manner in which it is accessible from anywhere at anytime, without being aware of the actual accessing of that information, while conjuring up the lifelike images and sensations that are beyond time and space, from user's standpoint, and by meeting the changing requirements flexibly and effectively. In the area of measurement and control systems that pertain to manufacturing systems, there exists a great deal of information and computing resources in the field, including sensors, controllers, and actuators. We believe that these resources in the field should be easily accessible and available from anywhere via networks and that field computing in the future will comprise a system environment that makes these resources available to more people and broader objectives effectively when necessary. This paper describes our work on a new computing architecture that will facilitate such a field-ubiquitous computing environment.