The first issue of this year’s Technical Review magazine featured an extensive interview on InnerWeb. Marcin Worecki, the company’s president, was interviewed by Ms. Lidia Sosnowska, starting with the history of the system’s creation, its main advantages as well as its plans for the future.
In a nutshell, answering the question of what the InnerWeb system is and what it consists of, one could say:
“A dense network of radio beacons inside an industrial plant creates an organism that provides real-time information about the work in progress in the form of mobile permissions, determines the geolocation of employees and facilities, and provides continuous PRE-FEED protection.”
We encourage you to read an excerpt from this passionate conversation.
The idea to build the InnerWeb system was a coincidence or the result of professional experience?
Definitely the latter. I am a design engineer by training and have been active in the industrial sector since 2005. Since 2011, for almost 10 years, I was in charge of installing production lines, machines, relocating these lines to Poland, and at the same time managing teams of employees at a plant in one of the companies in Bielsko-Biała. I noticed that year by year the number of procedures was increasing, which meant that the implementation of any commissioned service on the site required the writing out of paper permits, and in addition, for particularly dangerous work, with fire, at height, movement of materials around the plant, etc., more permits were needed. As a manager working with more than a dozen teams, I spent about 30 percent of my working time filling out forms, yet an engineer’s knowledge should be used for more complex tasks. In my opinion, constantly filling out documents only confirming work time is a waste of time. Such work can be done by a computer. I gained experience in programming while still in college, and wrote my master’s thesis on programming evolutionary algorithms. Armed with this knowledge and experiences from my daily work, I started looking for solutions to automate the entire work permit process.
What exactly is the uniqueness of the system and what are its biggest advantages?
The key thing is that we have the ability to monitor in real time the resources on the site. We are talking about external companies, employees, visitors as well as materials, vehicles and tools that are constantly on the move. And it is the monitoring of what is mobile on the 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 employees or vehicles, for example, are at any given time.
The technology involves installing a low-cost and dense network of BLE beacons throughout the industrial plant. This 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 and the network configured with a server and software for mobile devices.
This makes it possible to open mobile work permits (including dangerous ones) and, as I mentioned, to identify or geolocate workers and facilities throughout the plant.
InnerWeb is your first business project. Are there others in the plans, or will you rather develop and improve this system?
By design, we will continue to develop InnerWeb, as there are still several components and modules that need to be added to make the product comprehensive. However, it turns out that its core component (related to geolocation) also works well outside the industry. We built a system that is such a cortical part of InnerWeb. We are currently using it for mobile permissions. But it can support dozens of different applications and meet dozens of other needs. The platform for building application solutions based precisely on geolocation and micro-navigation, can be used – as I mentioned earlier – in public spaces. For example, making them easier to navigate for the blind. We are currently implementing such a project (as a subcontractor) for the City of Warsaw. Our task is to deliver the technology, i.e. all the transmitters to the designated locations. The project includes more than 100 public facilities – offices and all subway stations. Today, although offices are trying to make it easier for the blind to function in public space, such people still have to use sighted people all the time. Our solution will enable them to get to the right place and get things done on their own. We are implementing this project together with partners MobileMS from Lodz and SoniqSoft from Radlin. A team of almost fifty programmers, engineers and specialists is working on the system in its entirety. This is an interesting experience for us, but above all we want to work for the industry.”
