Digital assistance systems (DAS) have found their way into production aiming to reduce the risks of increasing cognitive stress of operators in an increasingly complex work environment. The use of DAS in production areas has led a variety of positive effects by reducing execution time of work tasks, search and communication times, human error probability and improving process stability. The introduction of DAS increases human-system interaction at the same time. Thereby the functional as well as informa-tional design of DAS represents a success factor. While the number of DAS offered on the market is continuously increasing – the difficulty of identifying the right DAS that supports users in their individual activities and tasks is increasing. A wide range of technical solutions for DAS are also already available on the market for the military sec-tor. Due to specific requirements of the military, it is not yet known how well these systems are in an effective balance with the individuality of users and activities to be performed in the sense of the MTO concept. Scientific methods for the evaluation of DAS in the military sector are currently still unknown.  

The goal of Digi_Assist is to evaluate DAS for military applications regarding the areas of collaborative and interactive maintenance and troubleshooting. The innovative con-tent of this proposal consists of structuring technical components of digital assistance systems for the military sector and specifying security concepts and IT architectures for selected application scenarios in order to provide an investment decision basis for the design, the prioritization and selection of digital assistance systems and their compo-nents. Therefore technical components of digital assistance systems have to be corre-lated with specific requirements of users and their activities to be performed according to MTO concept. Various correlation influences and interactions of different compo-nents of digital assistance systems provide the framework for evaluating digital assis-tance systems.

The result of Digi_Assist is a profound empirical and socio-technically oriented ap-proach for evaluating needs and human, technical and organization requirements of digital assistance systems for the military application area of collaborative and interac-tive maintenance and troubleshooting. The aim is to achieve a balance of human, technical and organizational requirements as well as recommendations of data security and transmission-secure procedures for the operation of digital assistance systems in various military applications. Further intended results and findings of Digi_Assist are in the area of documented market and technology analyses, the identification of a roadmap for possibly necessary developments and research needs as well as knowledge transfer and dissemination of project results.