Decision support for augmented reality-based assistance systems deployment in industrial settings

The successful deployment of augmented reality (AR) in the industry for on-the-job guidance depends heavily on factors such as the availability of required expertise, existing digital content and other deployment-related criteria such as a task's error-proneness or complexity. Particularly in idiosyncratic manufacturing situations involving customised products and diverse complex and non-complex products and its variants, the applicability and attractiveness of AR as a worker assistance system is often unclear and difficult to gauge for decision-makers. To address this gap, we developed a decision support tool to help prepare customised deployment strategies for AR-based assistance systems utilising manual assembly as the main example. Consequently, we report results from an interview study with sixteen domain experts. Furthermore, when analysing captured expert knowledge, we found significant differences in criteria weighting based on task complexity and other factors, such as the effort required to obtain data.