Smart Glasses for State Supervision in Self-Optimizing Production Systems

Self-optimizing production systems can adapt to changing environments and have a huge potential to overcome the polylemma of production between scale and scope as well as plan and value. These systems feature a high degree of autonomy in decision making, which makes it harder for humans to understand the current system state and its next actions. In case of derivations from expected behaviour, workers cannot react and initiate countermeasures to ensure quality and safety of the production process. Smart glasses are one promising approach to provide the necessary information to assess system status and make decisions concerning the production process. In order to provide the information, process data has to be collected, processed and visualized. This paper assesses the use case for smart g lasses in a self-optimizing assembly system for large airplane structures. Smart glasses can be used to keep workers involved in self-optimizing production systems. By providing information (visualised through Augmented Reality) about the production process, their expert knowledge enables improving the underlying model of these systems. Also, workers are empowered to interrupt the production process in case of unforeseen errors. The Aachen model of Internet of Production is used as a framework for the required infrastructure.