Ingress of Industry 4.0 in Indian Naval Ship Design and Building - Prognosis of VR / AR technologies

The transition from the erstwhile steam era to the modern digital era has been well documented. The adoption rate of cyber-physical systems under the aegis of Industry 4.0 (I4) has been breathtaking in every industrial field and certainly, it does not preclude the shipbuilding industry. Indian Navy (IN) and the strategic shipbuilding Indian shipyards have always been enthusiastic towards tapping the opportunity offered by soft computing, albeit in silos. It can be seen that the Indian shipbuilding landscape has been swift in comprehending the opportunity I4 offers. The authors Rana and Chhabra (2019) have examined this aspect in the developing navies and highlighted several consequential challenges linked to the process reengineering, an inevitable transformation whilst transitioning from standalone digital systems to interconnected Cyber-Physical Systems. In light of the above-mentioned challenges, the shipbuilding industry in its entirety has not exploited, the cradle to grave automation opportunity, offered by the I4 technologies. In the last six decades, although IN has excelled in developing Warship designs in-house and has reached a certain level of maturity in construction at the Government shipyards. IN continues to face several unique challenges in the adaptation of I4 technologies both at design houses and shipyards. The paper, therefore, attempts to examine some specific challenges being faced at the tactical level whilst embracing the 3D modeling in the immersive environment viz Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR / AR). There has been a global rise in the use of VR/AR Shipbuilding authoring tools as it offers an incredible opportunity to accelerate the ship design process, production, training, monitoring, and quality assurance. This paper explores the experiences of the leading shipyards across the globe whilst using the AR / VR technologies in their processes. The evaluation will also attempt to decipher the issues and challenges faced by users during the adoption and exploitation of these AR/VR systems. The authors have chosen to examine the ground level blind spots and challenges being faced whilst this technology is making inroads into the Indian shipbuilding scenario and summarise the tradeoffs and approaches taken so far to overcome these tribulations and speculate on the future direction. Further, as the immersive technologies cause a quantum growth of data transactions it naturally induces latency in data processing in the legacy networking architecture. This has been experienced by almost all the stakeholders viz designers, planners, production teams, overseers, etc as perhaps they were not in the position to interact with the databases concurrently. It was possibly due to the existing organisational structure and extant networking protocols and policies. To overcome this challenge the Fog Computing architecture seems to show promise.