abstract

ABSTRACT Shipbuilding companies are upgrading their inner workings in order to create Shipyards 4.0,
where the principles of Industry 4.0 are paving the way to further digitalized and optimized processes in an
integrated network. Among the different Industry 4.0 technologies, this paper focuses on augmented reality,
whose application in the industrial field has led to the concept of industrial augmented reality (IAR). This
paper first describes the basics of IAR and then carries out a thorough analysis of the latest IAR systems
for industrial and shipbuilding applications. Then, in order to build a practical IAR system for shipyard
workers, the main hardware and software solutions are compared. Finally, as a conclusion after reviewing
all the aspects related to IAR for shipbuilding, it proposed an IAR system architecture that combines cloudlets
and fog computing, which reduce latency response and accelerate rendering tasks while offloading compute
intensive tasks from the cloud.

The present paper is aimed at analyzing the latest research
and the best technologies to build an IAR system for a shipyard. Specifically, its main contributions are the following,
which, as of writing, have not been found together in the
literature:
• The article reviews the main characteristics of the most
recent IAR systems for industrial and shipbuilding applications.
• It provides thorough comparisons on the latest hardware
and software technologies for creating IAR solutions.
• This article also identifies and discusses different use
cases where IAR can be useful for shipbuilding.
• It proposes a novel IAR architecture that makes use of
Edge Computing to reduce latency response and accelerate rendering tasks