Implementing Virtuality in Production - a Design Science Approach

The trend toward smart production is omnipresent in research over recent years and there are different approaches how to making a production smart. One of these approaches is to enrich reality with virtual aspects. Alongside the efforts to make production smarter by implementing augmented and virtual reality devices arise the challenges like motion sickness, usability, the weight of devices, or simply the complexity of the implementation process. A forced implementation of smart applications could lead to the frustration of the applicants and ruin the fruitful ground for improvement. The right position for the implementation of virtuality measures as well as the right dose of implementation is essential for success. This paper aims to connect an existing comprehensive approach with the implementation process of virtuality in production and show that such a scientific-based approach supports such a task. Design science research offers an existing, well-elaborated framework for complex tasks and bears the potential to support a virtuality implementation process. This led to the research question: Does design science as an existing research framework support the virtuality implementation process in production? Design science defines the environment of application as characterized by people (in different roles and capabilities) an organization (with different processes and structures) and technologies (like infrastructure and communication). This environment could be seen as the production environment. Further, we do have a broad knowledge base due to the profound work of the academic community in the field of augmented and virtual reality and a huge methodological toolbox. The existing environment and knowledge base are the basements to create an artifact, evaluate, and reshaping it. With this paper, we suggest a design science research-based procedure to support the implementation of virtuality in production. Design science research comes out from information science and is more and more applied in other research fields. As a result of our work, we saw that following a structured approach like the design science approach has the potential to support companies to successfully implement virtuality measures in production.