Constructing and managing complex virtual worlds for manufacturing applications

Virtual reality is becoming a real business-oriented technology and holds great potentials especially in computerised manufacturing applications. Technical problems however have to be resolved before it can be practically employed. This paper reports the research into one of the crucial and challenging problems -the pain-taking and tedious process of creating and managing virtual manufacturing environments. The paper presents a method of managing virtual worlds, attempting to provide an effective approach to building complex virtual environments for manufacturing with less effort and shorter time. First the paper presents the concept behind the approach. Then it describes the computing algorithms for implementing the approach and presents a system of managing the virtual environments. In the end the paper discusses the applications of the approach with an emphasis on manufacturing operation planning.