AdvAR4AIServ: Advanced Augmented Reality Solutions for AI-based Servitization

pASML is a tech company and the innovation leader in the semiconductor industry. ASML provides leading patterning solutions that drive the advancement of microchips. The main pillars of the organization are RD, manufacturing, and customer support. ASML envisions that the trend towards service growth will affect its business, especially when the business becomes vastly mature. In particular, ASML envisions the need to broaden her customer value proposition with innovative services and generate opportunities with her increasing install base in this new era. This justifies rethinking the interaction between ASML and its customers: cost-plus pricing, the currently dominant pricing method, reached its limits in enabling further service growth. Next to the above, Augmented Reality (AR) creates a potential for enhancing the real-world environment with digital information., which has received an increasing amount of attention over recent years. Currently, widespread availability of the enabling hardware, such as Microsoft Hololens and RealWear, has been recognized for a wide variety of applications. For example, to help surgeons with live navigation during surgery or to complement the learning environment of students. AR is recognized as a promising technology also for advanced industrial applications. This project will focus on both aspects: development of innovative services and development of new service concepts based Augmented Reality. The project contains two tracks with three parts: 1. Investigate interaction between ASML and its customers in order to find new revenue streams based on existing and future service concepts. The aim is to increase value for the customer and to evaluate opportunities of capturing more value from this. 2. Utilize the available video-streams of wearable devices (i.e. Hololens), to recognize (the order of) actions performed by the service engineer and convert this in a format that can be used to identify best practices and to extract accurate logs, which will replace the current, error-prone manual logging actions. 3. Replace the current textual procedures by more graphical versions using Augmented Reality, where the right information is displayed when need (“just in time”), based on automatic recognition of the actions performed by the service engineer. Each track will be covered by a PhD student. Master students from the relevant programs can work on related topics (e.g., two student per year). At ASML, dedicated problem owners and company supervisors will supervise each PhD student. From the university, a promoter and daily supervisor are in charge of supervising the PhD student. For good embedding, a steering committee is formed. This committee includes senior people who assure that the research is aligned with the strategy of ASML as a whole and the strategies of other departments./p