A survey of indoor location technologies, techniques and applications in industry

The recent academic research surrounding indoor positioning systems (IPS) and indoor location-based services (ILBS) are reviewed to establish the current state-of-the-art for IPS and ILBS. This review is focused on the use of IPS / ILBS for cyber-physical systems to support secure and safe asset management (including people as assets), exploring the potential applications of IPS for industry as suggested in the literature. Current application areas in industry are presented, separated into physical item and human traceability applications for context. The literature are reviewed to identify gaps in the ILBS development for industrial applications, future research needs to focus a development framework to enable scalable solutions for industry. The key gaps identified in the literature are: (i) a lack of pathways to extend IPS research into an ILBS, (ii) no end-to-end ILBS have been developed and (iii) no framework has been reported that outlines the information pathways from sensor data collection and location information to an established ILBS. The technologies reviewed are presented in a comparison table (Table 1) intended as a reference for selecting technologies for future systems based on requirements. The techniques used to extract location information from each of the technologies identified are also explored stating current accuracy and aligning the techniques with their suitable technologies.