Objectif
A digital factory represents a persistent hybrid community where a rich virtualized environment representing a variety of factory activities will facilitate the sharing of factory resources, manufacturing information and knowledge and help the simulation of collaborative design, planning, production and management among different participants and departments.
DiFac aims at the development of an innovative Collaborative Manufacturing Environment (CME) for next generation digital manufacturing. The DiFac CME will be used as a framework to support group work in an immersive and interactive way, for concurrent product design, prototyping and manufacturing, as well as worker training. It will provide support for data analysis, visualization, advanced interaction and presence within the virtual environment, ergonomics analysis, and collaborative decision-making.
Within the DiFac CME, a systematic representation of product and process knowledge in a mixed 3D collaborative manufacturing environment will be provided to the user. Six components, namely Group Presence Modeller, Immersive Integrator, Collaboration Manager, Prototype Designer, Factory Constructor, Training Simulator will be seamlessly integrated into a new solution for collaborative digital manufacturing activities, for example, aiming to help work teams collaborate on the analysis of a product design, share information, evaluate testing results, manage knowledge and make decisions about development issues.
DiFac is an SME-driven STREP and its actions will target European SMEs in order to empower their position into the world market by providing advanced services and tools using state-of-the-art technologies.