At this year’s INFORMATIK conference held by the GI in Cottbus, I had the chance to present a research paper (full text here) about HoloBuilder—officially titled “Enabling Industry 4.0 with holobuilder”1—that I wrote together with my colleagues Kristina Tenhaft, Simon Heinen and Harry Handorf. In our paper, we examine HoloBuilder from a research rather than a marketing perspective by explaining and demonstrating how it acts as an enabler for Industry 4.0.
The paper was presented in the session named “Industry 4.0: Computer Science Forms New Production Systems”, which featured a selection of renowned experts for Industry 4.0—including Prof. Dr.-Ing. Peter Liggesmeyer of TU Kaiserslautern, Prof. Dr. Jürgen Jasperneite of OWL University and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jörg Wollert of Aachen University of Applied Sciences, among others. The presenters set a particular focus on topics such as Internet of Things, smart factories, wireless communication and OPC UA, with which our presentation fitted in seamlessly—as will be explained in the following. The feedback we received was consistently positive.
Industry 4.0
Industry 4.0 was the original use case of our platform, i.e., the use case based on which the first prototypes had been created. From those, the current form of HoloBuilder evolved. The term Industry 4.0 was first coined in the context of the High-Tech Strategy 2020 of the German government. Basically, the smart factory, in which people, machines and products are ubiquitously interconnected, is at the center of Industry 4.0.2 Particular focus is moreover on cyber-physical systems, which merge the virtual and the real world.
HoloBuilder & Industry 4.0
From the technical perspective, implementing Industry 4.0 to a high degree means realizing the smart factory including cyber-physical systems. For this, two prime concepts to consider are Augmented Reality and machine-to-machine communication. Augmented Reality (AR) adds virtual objects to the real world in a see-through scenario, e.g., with smart glasses or a tablet PC. On the one hand, AR provides a “fusion of the physical and the virtual world”3 and thus forms a framework for cyber-physical systems while on the other hand it facilitates efficient human–machine interfaces. Yet, AR alone cannot realize a smart factory, because it only caters for displaying objects, which is a form of one-way communication. Hence, AR needs to be complemented with capabilities for machine-to-machine communication (M2M).
To enable the implementation of Industry 4.0, HoloBuilder has been designed as a platform that makes it possible for everyone concerned to create and consume arbitrary AR content. This is a particular advantage over other AR solutions, which require specific skills for creating the desired content, among other things. In contrast, HoloBuilder facilitates end-user design, which enables, e.g., engineers and mechanics without programming skills to create AR applications in the context of Industry 4.0. To also cater for M2M, the platform as well incorporates OPC UA capabilities, which is a standardized protocol. In this way, information provided by a machine (e.g., its current temperature) can be presented in terms of virtual objects in an AR scenario. Moreover, by manipulating such virtual objects, the user can also give commands to the machine via OPC UA. This makes it possible to, e.g., display a virtual button that can switch a machine on or off.
Design Principles
Hermann et al.4 define six design principles for Industry 4.0, upon which we build to show HoloBuilder’s potential for being an enabler of Industry 4.0:
- Interoperability,
- Virtualization,
- Decentralization,
- Real-Time Capability,
- Service Orientation and
- Modularity.
Conclusion
To summarize the above, Augmented Reality and machine-to-machine communication are two core principles to be considered when implementing Industry 4.0 in terms of a smart factory with cyber-physical systems. HoloBuilder, a platform for end-user design of arbitrary AR content, provides support for both. Our platform moreover fulfills all of the six design principles for Industry 4.0, which underpins HoloBuilder’s potential as an enabler.
Our paper has been published in the proceedings of the 2015 INFORMATIK conference and is also available via ResearchGate (including full text).
1 At the time the paper was accepted, we still had the company-internal convention to write HoloBuilder in lowercase letters, which has changed by now.
2 http://www.plattform-i40.de/
3 Kagermann, Henning: Chancen von Industrie 4.0 nutzen [Taking the Chances of Industry 4.0]. In (Bauernhansl, Thomas; ten Hompel, Michael; Vogel-Heuser, Birgit, eds): Industrie 4.0 in Produktion, Automatisierung und Logistik [Industry 4.0 in Production, Automation and Logistics], pp. 603–614. Springer, 2014.
4 Hermann, Mario; Pentek, Tobias; Otto, Boris: Design Principles for Industrie 4.0 Scenarios: A Literature Review. 2015. Working Paper No. 01/2015, Audi Stiftungslehrstuhl Supply Net Order Management, TU Dortmund.
2008 – Tales of Design & User Experience 