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Funding: Funded by the Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme of the European Commission (European Commission 2019–2021). Child maltreatment has detrimental social and health effects for individuals, families and communities. The ERICA project is a pan-European training programme that equips non-specialist threshold practitioners with knowledge and skills to prevent and detect child maltreatment. This paper describes and presents the findings of a rapid review of good practice examples across seven participating countries including local services, programmes and risk assessment tools used in the detection and prevention of child maltreatment in the family. Learning was applied to the development of the generic training project. A template for mapping the good practice examples was collaboratively developed by the seven participating partner countries. A descriptive data analysis was undertaken organised by an a priori analysis framework. Examples were organised into three areas: programmes tackling child abuse and neglect, local practices in assessment and referral, risk assessment tools. Key findings were identified using a thematic approach. Seventy-two good practice examples were identified and categorised according to area, subcategory and number. A typology was developed as follows: legislative frameworks, child health promotion programmes, national guidance on child maltreatment, local practice guidance, risk assessment tools, local support services, early intervention programmes, telephone or internet-based support services, COVID-19 related good practices. Improved integration of guidance into practice and professional training in child development were highlighted as overarching needs. The impact of COVID-19 on safeguarding issues was apparent. The ERICA training programme formally responded to the learning identified in this international good practice review. Publisher PDF

This article presents the research results of the European project DiFac - Digital Factory for Human Oriented Production System, through new and innovative concepts in the area of continuously, integrated and collaborative factory planning - the Factory Constructor. The conceived and implemented architecture is overviewed, as well. Web-based collaboration tools, a VR tool for participative and interdisciplinary factory layout planning, a distributed VR environment for collaborative layout visualization and improvement as well as a web-based simulation tool for the optimization of the layout are integrated for the purposes of holistic and continuously factory and process planning.

In a highly competitive market as the today's one, the reduction of the costs and of the time to market is foundamental to maintain the competitiveness. In the motorbikes field especially, it is important to face the continuously changing trends of the market. In the life cycle of the motorbike product, the evaluation of the product design is very time consuming because it is composed by sketch selection, 3D model development, "loop" of physical mock-up realisation and evaluation/refining (usually by outsourcing). In this paper, a VR application for virtual mock-up evaluation, developed for Aprilia in the Eureka Project TWO, is presented. The system allows the design team to examine in a real-time interactive way, on a power-wall at 1:1 scale, the final virtual mock-up with all its materials, textures, surfaces and optional properties. The improvements and the updates of the mock-up requested by the team are performed virtually, thus by avoiding the physical refining, that is very time and money consuming.

One of the core issues of mass customization (MC) is to provide more and more conveniences to meet customer's customized requirements, and on the other hand to ensure near mass production efficiency and quality in manufacturing processes. Virtual Reality Environment (VRE) provides an immersive environment, in which real objects are reproduced as 3D virtual "real" ones. Augmented Reality Environment (ARE) gives a real world by integrating virtual objects with real objects. Mixed Reality Environment (MRE) is to establish a blended digital-real platform, on which views of the real world are accompanied in some proportion with views of a virtual environment, through the combined use of Virtual VRE/ARE/MRE technologies. Both VRE, ARE and MRE are capable of bringing the sense of being there to human beings. Thanks to these kinds of technologies that enable to integrate customers, product designers, production planners and operators as a whole and make it available to support MC. This paper will discuss how MRE, ARE and VRE support MC from product definition, product design with the intervention of customers at the very early phase, to production process by facilitating factory reconfiguration in accordance with individual demands.

Designing a new factory or reorganizing an existing one is a complex and time consuming job. Factory manager and designer need a powerful tool that let them to easily manipulate the different resources, storages area and transporters. The research work, here described, deals with the design and development of a low-cost three dimensional virtual environment applied to a factory layout design. While designing the software architecture we focused on the adoption of standard and low cost enabling technologies in order to provide to the user a simple way to explore the virtual factory, built according to the layout definition provided as an input. The overall object oriented approach gives to the software the possibility to be extended and improved with small effort on the existing code.

The life cycle of an industrial product goes through several stages, from the initial idea to the finished product, and on to the purchase and recycling. Virtual reality environments (VRE) allow the user to interact with a digital representation of a product, and so can be used to perform aesthetical, ergonomic, functional tests as well to support customer decisions in the selling process; mainly for customized products. In this contribution, ITIA-CNR presents two important applications in the shoes context: VRShoe and MagicMirror. VRShoe is a VRE for designing shoe aesthetics. MagicMirror, currently under development, is an augmented reality (AR) system for supporting the decision-making processes of customer customized shoes.

Production systems are changing very fast according with the rapid development of the market, the customer needs and the requirements and the products themselves. Designers and Engineers are asking for supporting tools in order to follow this trend in the proper way; the factory layout should be redesigned (for improving throughput or producing new products) or the factory has to be designed for another location (moving in a more cost-effective countries). ITIA has conducted research on Virtual Reality and Discrete Event Simulation applied to factory design and process simulation. Copyright © 2004 IFAC.

Under the pressure of shortening product life cycle to cope with turbulent market environment, manufacturing industry has to re-configure factory more and more in order to promote sustainable growth. Therefore the modularization and standardisation become key objectives for life cycle oriented plant design. This paper introduces the implementation of modular plant design, which is a result of EU-funded project "Modular Plant Architecture" (MPA). Object Oriented, Virtual Reality and Discrete Event Simulation technologies are adopted in this project.

This chapter examines some issues involved in producing custom footwear on a mass-market basis. The starting position for custom shoes is the measurement of feet. Traditional methods can be replaced nowadays more and more by modem measuring technology based on 3D scanners. While discussing foot measurements, the chapter will also address common misconceptions about foot measuring, shoe sizes, better fitting footwear and comfort. However, getting exact feet measures is just the necessary, but not the commensurate condition for customized footwear. The feet data have to be translated into a customer specific last and shoe design. In this context, we will outline the advances in current CAD/CAM software to facilitate the production of custom footwear satisfying the needs of mass-market consumers economically. Nowadays, shoe design is mainly done by brand. However, when providing custom footwear this is too time consuming and too vulnerable to errors when designs are interpreted in manufacturing. To solve this problem, the VRSHOE system was developed. A designer draws (creates) or modifies in this virtual shoe design environment directly on a (virtual) shoe model the style lines that were created before in the CAD system. Designers can fly-through the environment and interact directly with the shoe model using immersive interface devices. The user interface, the environment and the results obtained in this project wili be presented.

Virtual Reality (VR) techniques are, nowadays, consolidated in the scientific community as support tool along the whole product/process life cycle, but it is not commonly adopted by industries in their day-by-day activities; mainly because virtual applications are not always both user friendly, despite their own nature, as well reliable in the presentation of results. Immersive devices are not so easy to use and well developed to allow a interaction in a real natural way. In this paper we present some case studies where VR is used in industrial applications as support to product design, aiming to work on the virtual prototypes, trying to save materials, time and costs. The case applications are: the design of shoes style lines, factory's layout design and simulation, whitegoods configuration and test. Some guidelines for the creation of virtual interface will be presented.

One of the main problems of the product design and realisation process is the prototyping: the construction of prototypes for the functional, technical, aesthetic and ergonomic tests is a reason for modifications and recalls. It is also a cause of physical modification of the prototype itself. In this way, in the process there are just the spread of raw materials and the use of resources as machines, time and money. The use of Virtual Reality (VR) to make the prototyping process digital, immersive and interactive improves the process saving raw materials, costs and time. In this paper is presented a leading application in immersive-VR, developed at ITIA - CNR in the context of Eureka CODERAVI project, for the layout configuration of whitegoods in a designers technical meeting: a user wears a HMD and a dataglove and, by interacting with the virtual environment, s/he chooses the components from a library, mounts them together, modifies them, therefore generating a circular process until the obtainment of the desired result. The virtual experience of this user is projected on a wide screen so that the designers team can interact with him in a virtual meeting where suggestions and comments can be lived in real-time thanks to the actions of the user directly immersed in the virtual environment. A virtual user interface into the environment allows the user to manage the objects and the actions in a natural way. The tool developed and presented in this paper is an example about how VR can be conceived as a support tool for the virtual prototyping, by working in a virtual world where it is possible to perform several tests without any danger and cheaper then the traditional way.

Virtual factory is a system that allows the modelling and simulation of a factory in a virtual reality environment where both the layout design and the production process are taken into account, including: 1. the virtual design of the factory building in order to evaluate the environmental impact on the factory itself; 2. the virtual design of the production modules and to characterise the modules for simulation model; 3. the display of the events driven by simulation software in virtual reality interface. All the activities are supported by an object-oriented database, Standard Facility Library.

One of the research fields and applications of Virtual Reality (VR) is the virtual prototyping. Many big manufacturers of various goods have just started to use immersive systems for the visualization, the presentation and the analysis of their ideas, projects and products, for customers and industrial partners and also for private use in the product development. In this context the stereoscopic visualization, the visual simulation, the immersion and the interaction are powerful and relevant characteristics to improve the user examination, the aesthetic verification and the functional validation of the products. In this paper, ITIA - CNR aims to present a research project, in partnership with Electrolux-Zanussi, about a system for supporting the design process of whitegoods. The design's life cycle can be briefly summarized as: concept, details design, configuration, validation. Virtual reality can be used at the concept level to check the new ideas as well at the aesthetic and ergonomic validation level. The details designing is still a competency of a Computer Aided Design system. In the project hereafter presented, the VR is utilized as a support tool for the product configuration stage in order to perform aesthetic and ergonomic verifications: the main idea is to save times and costs related to the prototyping phase. To achieve these tasks a virtual environment has been conceived to allow the designer team to validate all the possible configurations of a specific product (different shapes of the control panel, of the buttons, different colours etc.) and, once the various product's classes has been identified, to start the ergonomic and usability validations, mainly for testing products interfaces and functionalities. The mechanical and dynamical checks are performed in a further phase using more proper and specialized tools. The virtual interface with which, in a first phase, the user decides the typology of the machine (configuration environment) by using tools like pencils, pens, erasers etc., then it becomes the environment for checking the performances, where the user can interact with a virtual, but working, model. In order to create this kind of interaction it has been important to design both an opportune interface inside the virtual world as well a different working place for the user/team that will use the application. A particular care it has been taken on the design and development of a driver to link the virtual product with the software (SW) embedded in the control panel of the real one so the virtual product works exactly like the real one. Two relevant aspects are presented in the paper: the SW design and the study of the ergonomy, human factors and usability, both of the VR environment as well of the user interface devices. The SW design manages the world's rules, the SW modules for the virtual hands, the objects, the navigation and the virtual tools. And more, it handles also the modeling of three-dimensional objects, the polygons reduction, the use of textures, of environment mapping and of bump mapping for graphics enhancement of graphics. The second aspect is the psychological aspect since it deals with the intellectual and sensorial human-machine interfacing aspects and methods. For the HW setup, the user is interfaced to the system with shutter glasses or with a Head Mounted Display, and he uses a dataglove and position trackers. A washing machine is the product used as an example to check the efficiency of the environment.