Shaping the future maintenance operations: reflections on the adoptions of Augmented Reality through problems and opportunities

Maintenance technicians play a fundamental role in ensuring the success of the system reliability, but several fatal accidents occur during the maintenance operations in Europe due to the nature of the job and to human errors. Augmented Reality (AR) technology could ease the execution of complex maintenance operations under specified conditions reducing the probability of failures, guiding through the task the technicians, updating in real-time the operators about the environmental and boundary conditions, reducing costs and time for service and maintenance, reducing documentation of work processes, increasing the level of safety and decreasing the human error probability. This paper investigates possible applications of AR technologies for assisting the workers during the maintenance operations, identifies challenges for the use of this technology in maintenance applications, and discusses the actual level of feasibility of the technology and the possible improvements in terms of information and communication selection and reduction of human errors.