ARZuKMU

Motivation

Today's manufacturing companies are faced with a large number of re-planning activities for existing factories and workshops. In addition, factory planning is often outsourced and carried out using complex processes, systems and tools. As a result, despite the direct impact of factory redesigns on employees, only a small proportion of them are involved in the planning process, with coordination usually taking place between external planners and managers. As a result, the in-depth process knowledge of production workers is not utilised and the results, which are often incomprehensible to workers, are internally rejected by them. In addition to inefficiencies in the processes, this often results in subsequent changes or longer ramp-up times, which ultimately leads to higher costs and also has a negative impact on competitiveness.

Objectives

With the help of the six partners involved, an innovative planning system based on Augmented Reality (AR) is to be developed within the framework of ARZuKMU, which will enable cross-disciplinary, cross-hierarchical and cross-company collaboration in factory planning projects. Collaborative factory planning is intended to ensure that the specific expertise of factory planners and production workers is linked and taken into account in the planning phase. In addition, ARZuKMU aims to qualify employees involved in the planning process for new tasks in their working environment. The new approach of simultaneous and continuous collaboration aims to broaden the scope of the planning process to generate new solutions and identify new alternatives. This opens up the possibility of increasing productivity and profitability in small and medium-sized enterprises and ensuring employee acceptance of planning measures.

Approach

The desired solution approach includes the use of AR with associated factory planning software and integrated options for employee participation in production, thus ensuring that the three dimensions of people, technology and organisation are taken into account. The first step is to capture the use cases and define the requirements for the overall approach. A holistic data model is then created to ensure that the AR system is linked to the software tools. Based on this, a concept for user interaction and collaboration using AR as well as suitable information processing is developed. Based on these findings, methods for employee participation and cross-hierarchical, cross-disciplinary and cross-company collaboration will be developed. The AR system will then be developed by specifying interfaces between the software, hardware and data model. The prototypical implementation and validation of the developed solution, complemented by an organisational evaluation, is carried out in parallel and as a follow-up to the development of the overall system. The step-by-step implementation allows the potential for improvement to be taken into account through user feedback during the development process. The final evaluation of the results will focus in particular on the ergonomic findings. The aim is to create guidelines for a new AR-based factory planning process and to develop a roadmap for cross-industry application.

Acknowledgments

This research and development project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) (reference number 02L22B025) and supervised by the Project Management Organisation Karlsruhe (PTKA). The iwb would like to thank its partners for their excellent support and cooperation.