Construction of Configurable Virtual Manufacturing Environments

This paper reports a method of constructing configurable virtual manufacturing environments for knowledge representation, acquisition, and shop-floor simulation. The method uses a set of template virtual environments that are developed in a layered structure and stored in a database. The database is developed to store the environments and manage the virtual objects and control data within the each environment. A system is developed based on this method and a user interface is provided for the system to support rapid construction of large-scale and complex virtual manufacturing environments.