Virtual Reality as a Tool for Sustainable Production in the ManuFuturing Model

Sustainable Production is a philosophy implying both economical and environmentally friendly development of a company, a society and of the world in which we and our future generations will leave. In order to improve the sustainability of the product and process life cycle, a model, called ManuFuturing (Manufacturing looking towards the Future) was developed. In ManuFuturing, Virtual Reality (VR) is and will be the main instrument to improve product design for sustainability, to reduce cost, resource consuming and pollution testing, to aid human resource training for product/process utilisation and maintenance. The paper will present a prototype of a virtual machining process to be used in a much larger virtual training environment both for academic as well as industrial applications. It is demonstrated that VR is a powerful tool for training and maintenance applications and is particularly well suited for sustainability. The paper will deal also with the deficiencies still present in the today VR technology and how the system can be improved to respond to the demand of manufacturing industry rather than only to the entertainment business. The prototype developed will be integrated in a Intranet/Internet environment that will be also presented.