Cloud-Based Augmented Reality Remote Maintenance Through Shop-Floor Monitoring: A Product-Service System Approach

Abstract

Maintenance and its cost continue, over the years, drawing the attention of production management, since the unplanned failures decrease the reliability of the system and the return of investments. Maintenance services of manufactured products are among the most common services in the industry; they account for more than half of the total costs and influence the environmental impact of the product. In order for manufacturers to increase their productivity, by performing accurate and quick maintenance, advanced monitoring systems should be considered in order to easily detect machine tool failures before they occur. Toward that end, a cloud-based platform for condition-based preventive maintenance, supported by a shop-floor monitoring service and an augmented reality (AR) application, is proposed as a product-service system (CARM2-PSS). The proposed AR maintenance service consists of algorithms of automated generation of assembly sequences, part movement scripts, and improved interface that aim to maximize existing knowledge usage while creating vivid AR service instructions. Moreover, the proposed monitoring system is supported by a wireless sensor network (WSN), and is deployed on a Cloud environment together with the AR tool. The monitoring system monitors the status of the machine tools, calculates their remaining operating time between failures (ROTBF), and identifies the available windows of the machine tools in order to perform the AR remote maintenance. In order to validate the proposed methodology and calculate its impact, it is applied in a real-life case study of a white-goods industry.

Augmented reality technology in the manufacturing industry: A review of the last decade

“…Ng et al (2013) have addressed ergonomic issues related to an AR-based assembly process. Remote applications with the use of AR have been proposed by Adcock and Gunn (2015), Gurevich et al (2015), Mourtzis et al (2017), and Neges et al (2017). SAR and MAR are among the emerging technical solutions.…”

Real-Time Remote Maintenance Support Based on Augmented Reality (AR)

“…Therefore, companies are maintaining an inventory of components. However, under the framework of Industry 4.0, and with the utilization of digital technologies, the existing inventory practices can be further improved through proper classification of the MRO components while additive manufacturing can facilitate in reducing lead times to produce several components [6][7][8][9][10][26][27][28].…”

“…Based on that concept, a considerable amount of research effort has been put on the design and development of real-time maintenance support tools and applications based on mobile devices to prevent unnecessary errors from happening [3][4][5][6]. With the evolution of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as well as the massive break out of augmented reality (AR), the research community extended that approach by exploiting the advantages of AR for data projection during the maintenance operations [6][7][8][9][10][11]. Generally, under the framework of Industry 4.0 in an…”

3D bare-hand interactions enabling ubiquitous interactions with smart objects

“…The rapid development of portable viewing devices with powerful processing and graphical rendering hardware, e.g., tablets, has resulted in an increased usage of AR as an intuitive user interface for information display and interaction with machines and services in smart factories and shop floors [3,28,29]. In a smart environment, machines, which are SOs, should be capable of operating in a coordinated manner and learning from their operations and events.…”