GIOVE Virtual Factory: the digital factory for human oriented production systems

In the current situation, with the high competition, mainly due to the globalization, and the severe economic crisis, the manufacturing systems, called Factories, have to solve highly complex tasks under increasing demands for adaptability, conomic performance, maintainability, reliability, scalability and safety. The paper concentrates on GIOVE Virtual Factory (GIOVE-VF), a tool developed at ITIA-CNR for the representation and the interaction within the Virtual Factory (VF). The created VF represents a persistent hybrid community where different users can collaborate within an enriched virtualized environment representing a variety of factory activities. The Virtual Environment (VE) has been created through the use of GIOVE libraries, where GIOVE stands for "Graphics and Interaction for OpenGLbased Virtual Environments". GIOVE toolset will be able to support collaboration among different sites and users during the design and analysis of a manufacturing system through an interactive environment with the aim to meet the challenge of delivering better quality factories in less time and with less planning associated costs. The use of such a technology will definitely lead directly in reinforcing competitiveness in the European industry and solving societal problems since it will provide many benefits: increased efficiency, reduction in complexity, reduction of factory design time and better working conditions. The paper presents the context, the architecture and tools that have been developed and concrete industrial scenarios that has been used for the evaluation of both technical as well human factors like collaboration and presence.