Collaborative Factory Planning in Virtual Reality

The competitive development and optimization of manufacturing systems challenge the collaboration and innovation of enterprises. Different information, thinking, and points of view have to be exchanged across engineering, decision-making, and executive levels safely and effectively. The Virtual Reality (VR) technologies provide the users advanced Human-Computer-Interfaces for designing, analyzing, and optimizing complex manufacturing systems. The objective of this paper is to describe a VR-based approach that allows the simultaneous visualization, investigation, and analysis for factory planning. This gives global entities a competitive advantage when conducting business.