A variant approach to constructing and managing virtual manufacturing environments

Virtual reality technology holds great potentials in computerized manufacturing applications. Technical problems however have to be resolved before it can be employed in practical manufacturing. This paper reports the research into one of those problems- the pain-taking and tedious process of creating and managing virtual manufacturing environments. First the paper presents an efficient approach to constructing virtual manufacturing environments. Then it proposes a system for managing the environments and describes in details the methods and techniques for building the system. In the end the paper discusses the applications of the approach and shows an example of using the system in constructing virtual manufacturing environments for planning manufacturing operations.