Exploring Augmented Reality Applications to Support Maintenance Management in Hydroelectric Power Plants

Abstract

Several enabling technologies were adopted to transform industrial sectors and deliver benefits in Industry 4.0. Within an advanced Human-Machine Interface, Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that can be applied to this purpose in physical asset management. Nevertheless, AR applications for maintenance are still emerging and not widely used, especially in the power generation industry. Hence, this paper proposes AR applications to support maintenance management in hydroelectric power plants (HPPs). To this end, the methodology comprised five steps: a review of AR technology, identification of needs and opportunities for maintenance management, propositions of AR applications, demonstration through AR prototyping, and discussion of the applications. As the main result, a set of proposals for AR applications were presented and discussed to support maintenance management in HPPs. The proposed AR applications mainly addressed activities of the maintenance planning and execution processes and showed the potential to contribute to human reliability aspects in the plant and boost digital transformation within maintenance.