An Empirical Study of 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. In this paper, the following topics are discussed: 1) the integration of the simulation and the virtual reality; 2) the virtual factory development on workstation and personal computer; 3) the modularization of virtual factory, which are mainly based on our researches from two recent European research projects : the ManuFuturing and the MPA. The present study is part of a development towards the concept of the Digital Enterprise.