Factory Animation by Self-Organization Principles

In the paper a novel idea of combining a virtual reality with an automated action control based on selforganization simulation is introduced. The concept provides an intelligent control for entities in the virtual reality enabling the user to participate in real-time to the self-organization simulation through the virtual reality interface. The concept is demonstrated with an implementation in a manufacturing domain, where a real world factory shop-floor is modeled in virtual reality, and factory operations are controlled based on selforganization simulation. The control provides a real time and continuous adaptation of the factory operations to the user interactions and other environmental disturbances. The implementation is based on distributed programming, where the self-organization simulator and the virtual factory are running on a separate computers. Two programs interchange continuously information through a local area network. The first implementation have proved to provide suf..