Elektronik und Informatik
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Although production processes in Industry 4.0 set- tings are highly automated, many complicated tasks, such as machine maintenance, continue to be executed by human workers. While smart factories can provide these workers with some digitalization support via Augmented Reality (AR) devices, these AR tasks depend on many contextual factors, such as live data feeds from machines in view, or current work safety conditions. Although currently feasible, these localized contextual factors are mostly not well-integrated into the global production process, which can result in various problems such as suboptimal task assignment, over-exposure of workers to hazards such as noise or heat, or delays in the production process. Current Business Process Management (BPM) Systems (BPMS) were not particularly designed to consider and integrate context-aware factors during planning and execution. This paper describes the AR-Process Framework (ARPF) for extending a BPMS to support context-integrated modeling and execution of processes with AR tasks in industrial use cases. Our realization shows how the ARPF can be easily integrated with prevalent BPMS. Our evaluation findings from a simulation scenario indicate that ARPF can improve Industry 4.0 processes with regard to AR task execution quality and cost savings.
While Virtual Reality (VR) has been applied to various domains to provide new visualization and interaction capabilities, enabling programmers to utilize VR for their software development and maintenance tasks has been insufficiently explored. In this paper, we present the Hyper-Display Environment (HyDE) in the form of a mixed-reality (HyDE-MR) or virtual reality (HyDE-VR) variant respectively, which provides simultaneous multiple operating system window visualization with integrated keyboard/mouse viewing and interaction using MR or in pure VR via a virtual keyboard. This paper applies HyDE in a software development case study as an alternative to typical non-VR Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), supporting software engineering tasks with multiple live screens in VR as an augmented virtuality. The MR solution concept enables programmers to benefit from VR visualization and virtually unlimited information displays while supporting their more natural keyboard interaction for basic code-centric tasks. Thus, developers can leverage VR paradigms and capabilities while directly interacting with their favorite tools to develop and maintain program code. A prototype implementation is described, with a case study demonstrating its feasibility and an initial empirical study showing its potential.