A Practical Use of the Virtual Factory Framework

Nowadays, most of the industrial companies adopt several digital tools to improve their performance, e.g. decreasing the production costs, reducing the delivery time, optimizing the production scheduling, etc.. However, the interoperability between such digital tools is still far from being reached, thus failing to fully exploit the potentiality of a virtual manufacturing approach. This research topic has been addressed by the European project named Virtual Factory Framework (VFF). This paper briefly introduces VFF and then demonstrates its potentiality by showing how it can be applied to an industrial case provided by the COMPA Company. Different software tools (i.e. a 3D visualization tool, a web portal, a Decision Support System, and a Failure Mode and Effects Analysis tool) have been integrated in the framework of VFF and then used to support the design of a manufacturing system and its production processes.