In the first edition of this year's magazine Przegląd Techniczny an extensive interview about InnerWeb appeared. Ms. Lidia Sosnowska spoke with Marcin Worecki, the company's president, starting from the history of the system's creation, its main advantages, and plans for the future.
In short, answering the question what is the InnerWeb system and what does it consist of, one could say that:
"A dense network of radio beacons inside an industrial plant creates an organism that in real time transmits information about ongoing work in the form of mobile permits, determines the geolocation of employees and objects, and provides constant PRE-fire protection."
We encourage you to read a fragment of this passionate conversation.
Was the idea to build the InnerWeb system a coincidence or the result of professional experience?
Definitely the latter. By education, I am a design engineer and since 2005 I have been active in the industrial sector. Since 2011, for almost 10 years, I was involved in installations of production lines, machines, relocation of these lines to Poland, and at the same time I managed teams of workers on the premises of the plant at one of the companies in Bielsko-Biała. I noticed that year after year the number of procedures is growing, which cause that the execution of any commissioned service on the plant premises requires filling out paper permits, and additionally for particularly dangerous work, with fire, at height, movement of materials around the plant, etc., more are needed. As a manager collaborating with over a dozen teams, I spent about 30 percent of my working time on filling out forms, and after all, an engineer's knowledge should be used for more complex tasks. Constantly filling out documents that only confirm working hours is, in my opinion, a waste of time. Such work can be done by a computer. I gained programming experience back at university, and I wrote my master's thesis on programming evolutionary algorithms. Armed with this knowledge and experience from my daily work, I began searching for solutions that would allow automating the entire process of issuing work permits.
What exactly makes the system unique and what are its greatest advantages?
The key thing is that we have the ability to monitor in real time the resources on the plant premises. We are talking here about external companies,employees, guests, as well as materials, vehicles, and tools that are constantly in motion. And it is precisely the monitoring of what is mobile on the plant premises that differentiates us from the competition. It takes place with an accuracy of at least 5 meters every few seconds, so you can check in real time where, for example, employees or vehicles are at any given moment.
The technology consists of installing a cheap and dense network of BLE radio beacons on the premises of the entire industrial plant. It takes from a few days to a few weeks – depending on the size of the monitored area – without stopping the production process. A virtual map of the plant is then created, along with a network configured with a server and software for mobile devices.
This enables opening mobile work permits (including dangerous ones) and – as I mentioned – identifying and geolocating employees and objects throughout the entire plant.
InnerWeb is your first business project. Are there plans for others, or will you rather develop and perfect this system?
By design, we will continue to develop InnerWeb, because there are still several components and modules that need to be built for the product to be comprehensive. However, it turns out that its basic element (related to geolocation) also works outside of industry. We built a system that is such a core part of InnerWeb. Currently, we use it for issuing mobile permits. However, it can serve dozens of different applications and satisfy dozens of other needs. The platform for building application solutions based on geolocation and micronavigation can be used – as I mentioned earlier – in public spaces. For example, making it easier for blind people to move around them. We are currently implementing such a project (as a subcontractor) for the capital city of Warsaw. Our task is to deliver the technology, meaning all transmitters to the designated locations. The project covers over 100 public utility facilities – offices and all metro stations. Today, although offices try to make it easier for blind people to function in public spaces, such people still have to rely on the help of sighted people. Our solution will enable reaching the right place and handling the matter independently. We are implementing this project together with partners – the company MobileMS from Łódź and the company SoniqSoft from Radlin. A team of almost fifty programmers, engineers, and specialists is working on the entire system. This is an interesting experience for us, but above all, we want to work for the benefit of industry."