James Millar Ritchie

The Generation and Practical Use of Plans for Manual Assembly using Immersive Virtual Reality

Abstract The preparation of assembly plans for manufactured goods is a major bottleneck in the time it takes to bring many new products to market. Computer aided assembly planning (CAAP) systems have been the subject of considerable research in recent years without achieving significant up-take in manufacturing industry. This paper proposes an alternative approach based on the adoption of immersive virtual reality, which is used here to produce practical downstream manufacturing information. The product is assembled from computer aided design (CAD) models of its components by experienced assembly operators working in a virtual environment. The operators actions are monitored and assembly sequence plans are automatically generated by the system. In the research described in this paper, the plans produced for an advanced electromechanical product were then used by a second group of participants to demonstrate the functionality of the system in an industrial environment. The development of virtual reality-based assembly planning carries with it the opportunity not only to shorten the product innovation cycle but also to capitalize on the experience of assembly operators and bring this to bear much earlier in the design process.

Assembly planning in a virtual environment

This paper presents novel tools to assist manual assembly in an virtual environment. While assembling virtual components, the users actions are logged and an assembly plan is produced. Prototyping is reduced and concurrency is enhanced using such tools. Successful pilot studies have now been completed.

Project planning in a virtual world: information management metamorphosis or technology going too far?

The paper considers the emerging technology of virtual reality (VR) as a tool to help manage and make sense of complex management information systems. Project management is taken as an example business system, with broad commercial and industrial applications, that depend on the efficient and effective communication of information at several organisational levels to succeed. The use of a virtual world, having three physical dimensions and a time dimension, as a metaphor to represent planning, sequencing, and scheduling information in a way that improves the communication process is considered. Examples of how the technology has been used to date are given. The technology is shown to have a lot to offer complex information environments such as large projects. However, there are clearly gaps in how the technology can be used cost effectively and how far the concept of a virtual world should be taken as a replacement for more traditional, two dimensional and symbolic, methods of communicating information.

A methodology for eliciting expert knowledge in virtual engineering environments

This paper explains how assembly planners are nonintrusively interrogated whilst immersively assembling virtual reality-modeled products. Product/process knowledge can be formalized, proving that techniques exist which can elicit expert knowledge using VR. This methodology may have profound implications for the interrogated and globalized virtual technology-based engineering environments of the next century.

Management and control in the virtual supply chain

Explores some of the issues arising from the potential implementation of virtual environments (VEs) for the management and control of supply chains. VEs, more commonly known as virtual reality (VR), coupled with world-wide telecommunications technology, will potentially enable organisations that are physically remote from each other to operate processes and obtain performance information in other organisations. This paper examines what is theoretically possible with VEs within supply chains and maps this on to research currently being carried out which investigates how manufacturing supply chains operate in the United Kingdom, especially Scotland.