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In the modern market scheme, Market 4.0, there is an evident need for improved quality, increased quantities and lower delivery times of products. However, customers seek for highly personalized products. Consequently, production engineers must include customers in the product design phase so as to meet their unique requirements. On the contrary, during the fourth industrial revolution, cutting-edge digital technologies, such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Cloud technologies have reached a high level of maturity. AR is a digital technology, capable of super-imposing digital information to the user’s physical environment. Furthermore, with the adoption of the Learning Factory concept, academia contributes to the development of new skills and competencies, for the new generation of engineers, that align with the ever-increasing global market demands. As such, in this paper, a framework enabling collaborative product design based on AR is presented, which acts as the digital thread for connecting engineers to customers. The participants will design and develop a Cloud platform for supporting file exchange and storage. Moreover, the Cloud platform can be realized as the communication layer between the stakeholders. In addition to that, an end-user application for the product design, customization and visualization with the use of AR will also be developed. Finally, the proposed framework will be tested in vitro, in a machine shop, in order to gather useful insight into the skills and competencies acquired by the participants during the development of the project.
Mourtzis et al. (Wed,) studied this question.