Smart Maintenance: A Wearable Augmented Reality Application Integrated with CMMS to Minimize Unscheduled Downtime

The ultimate goal of maintenance managers in any industrial firms is to maximize the uptime of the production assets and to keep the downtime to a minimum. These factors affect the capability of an industry to meet the production deadline while still ensuring the good quality product at minimum production cost. To realize this objective, effective maintenance method and innovative tool are required. Previous study has shown that the growing complexity of current manufacturing technologies will necessitate the increasing competent and trained personnel to resolve quickly the interruptions that occur in the shop floor. However, an efficient repair operation is sometimes difficult to achieve especially when the dysfunctional machine involves various possible problems and the assignment of skilled technician and resources to attend to the failed equipment requires more than just the information reported by the operator concerning what was not functioning on site. Augmented Reality (AR) as one of the emerging technologies in the framework of Industry 4.0 provides a way to accelerate the maintenance process and to minimize the recommissioning of maintenance work due to limited maintenance information provided by the operator. This paper presents the application of AR integrated with CMMS on the emerging computing platform Hololens to demonstrate the potential of this integration to optimize the pipeline of maintenance procedure in order to boost the profitability and competitive advantage of an industrial firm.