Enhanced Industrial Maintenance Work Task Planning by Using Virtual Engineering Tools and Haptic User Interfaces

Good maintainability is an essential feature for machines and processes in industry. It promotes, among others, maintenance safety, postmaintenance reliability and cost-effective maintenance by ensuring quick and easy operation and short downtime. Virtual engineering tools provide an effective way for maintainability design already during the design phase. Machine designers may not consider maintenance tasks systematically, which can leave important task details open. The missing detail planning can contribute significantly to the probability of safety or reliability risks. So far, generic tools or facilities for planning demanding maintenance tasks in detail have not been available for companies’ independent use. Another challenge is to develop and apply better user interfaces for design processes. Virtual engineering tools, such as virtual reality (VR) and haptics, provide a potential solution for improving maintenance planning and maintainability design. This paper introduces development and benefits of a new haptic interface for planning and training industrial maintenance tasks. The paper introduces a test with haptics tools in virtual maintenance case examples. As a conclusion we will sum up, whether the use of a haptic user interface would enhance task planning and maintainability design. In addition, we propose a set of recommendations regarding use of haptics in maintenance planning and maintainability design.