Factory animation by self-organization principles

A novel idea of combining virtual reality with automated action control based on self-organization simulation is introduced. The concept provides intelligent control for entities in virtual reality enabling the user to participate in real-time to the self-organization simulation through the virtual reality interface. The concept is demonstrated with an implementation in a manufacturing domain, where a real world factory shop-floor is modeled in virtual reality, and factory operations are controlled based on self-organization simulation. The control provides a real time and continuous adaptation of the factory operations to the user interactions and other environmental disturbances. The implementation is based on distributed programming, where the self-organization simulator and the virtual factory run on separate computers. Two programs continuously interchange information through a local area network. The first implementation has provided sufficient response times for real time user interactions.