Immersive and Distributed Technologies for Simulation and Industrial Innovation

Today innovative technologies allow to develop new performing systems; therefore, also complex in terms of interactions among components and emerging behaviors. Usually, in these systems it is necessary not only to properly design and engineer the single component, but even the whole system, as well as the interactions with humans devoted to operate or to supervise with it; from this point of view digital technologies and simulation models are crucial and they allow to identify new and high performing configurations as well as requirements for man machine interface, innovative strategies and training programs. Indeed, in many cases the humans represent a critical element of the system itself as it is evident when we address the crew of a vessel or of a plane. Consequently, the human factors and digital technologies that enable people to develop new use cases and improve decision making are an essential component to drive innovation and design new systems; in this Thesis different cases have been investigated by using innovative simulation models and studying the application of digital technologies. The first case is about an innovative immersive simulation system for training the crew of NH90 aircraft; the simulator is based on virtual reality technologies (e.g. head mounted display) integrated with an electromechanical motion platform, this layout creates an interactive and immersive training equipment, able to guarantee high quality training as well as compact and transportable quite low-cost solution. Furthermore, it has been developed an automated system to collect data about the user’s response time to visual stimuli and it has been analyzed the possible negative training risk related to adopt these technologies in terms of impacts on human factors as well as on the simulation sickness phenomenon. Furthermore, the application of Internet of Things and Cloud technologies will be analyzed to highlight relevant aspects of real use cases in the industrial sector.Indeed, a functional study of the application of IoT to optimize resources in the industrial sector is presented with the proposition of a cloud architecture to automate the recognition of technical documentation.