Technical and Organizational Issues about the Introduction of Augmented Reality in Maintenance and Technical Assistance Services

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) is an emerging technology that can provide support to the provision of maintenance and technical assistance services by dispersed technicians, who are not convenient skilled to deal with the increasing complexity of modern products. This paper, through a case study in an industrial context, presents the main technical and organizational challenges that have to be faced in order to introduce AR in the delivery process of maintenance services.

Augmented reality in support of Industry 4.0—Implementation challenges and success factors

“…On the other hand, it causes substantial organisational changes. This can relate to the processes supported by AR itself, the organisational structure and employee education [61], or the user acceptance [96]. The latter one is likely caused by the unfamiliarity with such a system.…”

“…The organisation needs to be prepared and ready before implementing AR. Especially two perspectives have been identified as relevant in AR and TOE literature, namely adapting the process [61,104] and involving the users before and during the implementation process [62]. The processes AR supports need to be adapted and re-engineered to fit the technology.…”

How Advances of ICT will Impact on Service Systems and on the Delivering of Product-Related Services

“…AR, instead, relates to any technology that, superimposing virtual signs to a real scene, helps to guide its users (e.g. the field technician, the product user) in performing a task through the visualization of the right information in the right place and in real time [19]. To recognize what is viewed, retrieve, transmit and anchor the information on the user's view, software (artificial) rather than human agents can be leveraged.…”

Augmented reality in support of intelligent manufacturing – A systematic literature review

“…However, it has to be pointed out that the study not only focussed on the use of augmented reality but also looked into workflow improvement through software integration. Another exception is the study by Porcelli et al (2013) as discussed above. However, no quantitative results have been used to validate the improvement due to AR.…”

“…A similar system developed by Wang et al (2014) is marker-based. According to Porcelli et al (2013), using such AR telepresence systems can alter the whole service delivery system. The findings are based on a field experiment with several field operators using AR telepresence systems.…”