A New Age for Plant Maintenance: Making use of Augmented Reality to Improve Maintenance of Production Assets

The cost of an inefficient maintenance strategy within a manufacturing process can significantly inflate the cost of products. Mismanagement within this particular manufacturing area can be so detrimental to a company's finances that expenses related to maintenance can eventually become comparable to energy-related costs. Therefore, these realities demand that maintenance managers keep up their game to ensure efficient and orderly servicing of production assets. This prevents maintenance tasks from taking a significant chunk of any operational budget. As companies shift towards the paradigm of Industry 4.0, digitalisation tools have revolutionised the manufacturing landscape, upgrading and improving various manufacturing disciplines to create smart factories. This digital revolution has also influenced plant maintenance strategies, and it is anticipated that Extended Reality (XR) technologies, such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), will heavily feature in future maintenance tasks. This research paper explores the potential role that AR has to play within a process improvement programme explicitly targeting the Reactive Maintenance (RM) process of automation systems. Through a process improvement programme that culminated in developing a proof of concept AR-based software, it has been found that such a technology can potentially increase the Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) of automation systems by up to 11%. The positive results presented in this research contribute to further studies and subsequent utilisation of digitalisation tools to improve plant maintenance.