Interactive virtual factory for design of a shopfloor using single cluster analysis

An interactive virtual factory testbed was developed as a part of a research to explore the applications of virtual environments (VE) 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. This paper further discusses several computational issues of developing such factories including the scene graph structures, frame based intersection detection and visual realism for creating a reliable virtual interface. Finally, a single cluster analysis algorithm is implemented as an example of applying traditional factory design methods in developing virtual factories of the future.