Combining Digital Twins and Mixed Reality - How Can the Process Industry Benefit?

The impressive potential of Mixed Reality applications has been shown in consumer electronics over recent years. Furthermore, the concept of Digital Twins in production is one of the major trends in automation and enables a wide range of beneficial technologies. In this paper, we investigate how these two trends can be combined to optimize existing workflows in the process industry. We show applications of visualizing information from a DT with AR and VR environments based on two plant maintenance use cases in-depth and illustrate specific resource optimization potential. Afterward, detailed technical concepts are described to solve derived challenges. Finally, a fully integrated demonstrator implementation is presented to validate the proposed concepts.