Factory Layout Planner: How To Speed Up The Factory Design Process In A Natural And Comfortable Way

This paper describes a new tool, named Factory Layout Planner (FLP). The FLP is meant to speed up the factory design process and to facilitate the cooperation of heterogeneous actors usually involved in the design, simulation and analysis of future or existing layouts. The idea is to provide an innovative environment where people can perform the aforementioned activities in a natural, comfortable and creative way, without any constraints. In the vision of the authors, this requirement points to the massive use of 3D technology supported by a new human-computer interaction solution based on the multi-touch paradigm. The FLP provides both 3D and discrete event simulation capabilities, that are key enabling technologies in speeding up the layout planning process and in finding out the desired solution. A simple test case is reported to demonstrate the industrial applicability of the FLP.