Hanno Voet

flapAssist: How the integration of VR and visualization tools fosters the factory planning process

Virtual Reality (VR) systems are of growing importance to aid decision support in the context of the digital factory, especially factory layout planning. While current solutions either focus on virtual walkthroughs or the visualization of more abstract information, a solution that provides both, does currently not exist. To close this gap, we present a holistic VR application, called Factory Layout Planning Assistant (flapAssist). It is meant to serve as a platform for planning the layout of factories, while also providing a wide range of analysis features. By being scalable from desktops to CAVEs and providing a link to a central integration platform, flapAssist integrates well in established factory planning workflows.

Virtual Production Intelligence (VPI)

The research area Virtual Production Intelligence (VPI) focuses on the integrated support of collaborative planning processes for production systems and products. The focus of the research is on processes for information processing in the design domains Factory and Machine. These processes provide the integration and interactive analysis of emerging, mostly heterogeneous planning information. The demonstrators (flapAssist, memoSlice und VPI platform) that are information systems serve for the validation of the scientific approaches and aim to realize a continuous and consistent information management in terms of the Digital Factory. Central challenges are the semantic information integration (e.g., by means of metamodeling), the subsequent evaluation as well as the visualization of planning information (e.g., by means of Visual Analytics and Virtual Reality). All scientific and technical work is done within an interdisciplinary team composed of engineers, computer scientists and physicists.