Collaborative Virtual Reality Decision Tool for Planning Industrial Shop Floor Layouts

This paper presents a methodology and the associated tool for enhancing decision making in shop floor layout using collaborative virtual reality, associated to real-time performance indicators in Industry 4.0. It first describes the collaborative architecture of the application. Subsequently, application features like: visualization at scale one (machines, industrial environment’s top view, product flow path), 3D model interaction (setting layout), physical process flow evaluation (spaghetti diagrams, Key Performance Indicators-KPI), testing multiple configurations (via save and load). Finally, paper illustrates possible usages and benefits of how VR tool helps improve ergonomics and safety; helps reduce deliberation time and bottlenecks through machine spatial footprint, visualization, scale one experience and referring KPIs.
© 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license