Development of an augmented reality-based process management system: The case of a natural gas power plant

Abstract

Since the beginning of the Industry 4.0 era, Augmented Reality (AR) has gained significant popularity. Especially in production industries, AR has proven itself as an innovative technology renovating traditional production activities, making operators more productive and helping companies to make savings in different expense items. Despite these findings, its adoption rate is surprisingly low especially in production industries, due to various organizational and technical limitations. Various AR platforms have been proposed to eliminate this gap, however, there is still not a widely accepted framework for such a tool. This research presents the reasons behind the low adoption rate of AR in production industries, and analyzes the existing AR frameworks. Based on the findings from these analyses and a conducted field study, a cloud-based AR framework, which provides tools for creating AR applications without any coding and features for managing, monitoring and improving industrial processes is proposed. The design and development phases are presented together with the evaluation of the platform in a real-world industrial scenario.

Keywords:

• Augmented reality
• Industry 4.0
• authoring tool
• remote support
• cloud system
• process monitoring

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Scientific Research Unit (BAP) of Istanbul Technical University under Grant number MGA-2018-41553; the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK TEYDEB) under Grant number 7170742.

Notes on contributors

Mustafa Esengün

Mustafa Esengün received a B.Sc. degree in computer engineering from Middle East Technical University in 2013, an M.Sc. degree in computer engineering from Istanbul Technical University (ITU) in 2016. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Computer Engineering Department of ITU. His research interests include human-computer interaction, user experience, industrial augmented reality, and mobile application development.

Alp Üstündağ

Alp Üstündağ is the Head of Industrial Engineering Department of Istanbul Technical University (ITU) and the coordinator of MSc in Big Data & Business Analytics Program. He has worked in IT and finance industry from 2000 to 2004. He continued his research studies at the University of Dortmund between 2007 and 2008 and completed his doctorate at ITU in 2008. He has conducted a lot of research and consulting projects in the finance, retail, manufacturing, energy, and logistics sectors. His current research interests include artificial intelligence, digital transformation, data science, machine learning, financial and supply chain analytics. He has published many papers in international journals and presented various studies at national and international conferences.

Gökhan İnce

Gökhan İnce received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Istanbul Technical University, Turkey, in 2004, an M.S. degree in information engineering in 2007 from Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany and a Ph.D. degree in the Department of Mechanical and Environmental Informatics, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan in 2011. From 2006 to 2008, he was a researcher with Honda Research Institute Europe, Offenbach, Germany and from 2008 to 2012, he was with Honda Research Institute Japan, Co., Ltd., Saitama, Japan. Since 2012, he has been an associate professor with the Computer Engineering Department, Istanbul Technical University. His current research interests include human-computer interaction, robotics, artificial intelligence and signal processing. He is a member of IEEE, RAS, ISAI and ISCA.