The Comparison of Integrative Technologies among Heterogeneous Systems for a Virtual Factory Development

Virtual factory is a system that allows the modelling and the simulation of a factory in a virtual reality environment where both the layout design and the production process are taken into account. The first idea of linking virtual reality to discrete events simulation stemmed from the ManuFuturing project. Afterwards, it is evolved and has been further developed in an European Union research project: MPA. In the MPA, the virtual reality system is running on graphical workstation and mainly developed using C++, while the simulation system and the standard facility library (the DB containing the whole factory resources and building blocks) are based on PC and Java. Three integration solutions are discussed in this paper: 1) Socket/TCP/IP; 2) XML; 3) CORBA infrastructure. The advantages and disadvantages for each solution are analysed and compared. The present study is part of a development towards the concept of the Digital Enterprise.