Introduction and establishment of virtual training in the factory of the future

Abstract

In order to make the factory of the future vision a reality, various requirements need to be met. There is a need to continuously qualify the human worker about new and changing technology trends since the human is the most flexible entity in the production system. This demands introducing novel approaches for knowledge-delivery and skill transfer. This paper introduces the design, implementation and evaluation of an advanced virtual training system, which has been developed in the EU-FP7 project VISTRA. The domain of interest is automotive manufacturing since it is one of the leading industries in adopting future factory concepts and technologies such as cyber-physical systems and internet of things. First of all, the authors motivate the topic based on the state-of-the-art concerning training systems for manual assembly and relevant technologies. Then, the main challenges and research questions are presented followed by the design and implementation of the VISTRA project including its methodologies. Furthermore, the results of experimental and technical evaluation of the system are described and discussed. In the conclusion, the authors give an outlook at the implementation and evaluation of the example application in related industries.

Keywords:

• advanced interaction
• digital factory
• factory of the future
• human-centred production
• Industry 4.0
• semantics
• training systems
• virtual reality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted in the context of the VISTRA project, which is co-funded by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Union under theme ‘ICT-2011.7.4 Digital Factories: Manufacturing Design and Product Lifecycle Management’ [project number ICT-285176].