Interactive design of a virtual factory using cellular manufacturing system

An interactive virtual factory testbed was developed as a part of a research to explore the applications of virtual environments in the area of manufacturing automation. This fully immersive factory built with special attention to details consists of a set of modular machines that a designer can drag and place in the factory to study issues such as plant layout, clusters and part flow analysis. The paper further discusses several cell formation and visualization techniques developed especially for the design of the virtual factory. A modified Boolean matrix approach algorithm was improved as an example of applying traditional factory design methods in developing virtual factories of the future. Finally a novel interactive part-machine matrix visualization interface was developed to provide a more intuitive view of the mathematical results.