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

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.