DiFac: Digital Factory for Human Oriented Production System.

DiFac is an IST research project (FP6-2005-IST-5-035079) funded by the European Commission within the 6th Framework Programme priority called "Collaborative Working Environment". The project aims to develop an innovative Collaborative Manufacturing Environment (CME) for the next generation of Digital Factory in order to support the competitiveness of SMEs. A digital factory represents a persistent hybrid community where a rich virtualised environment representing a variety of factory activities will facilitate the sharing of factory resources, manufacturing information and knowledge, and help the simulation of collaborative design, planning, production and management among different participants and departments. The DiFac CME will be used as a framework to support group work in an immersive and interactive way for three manufacturing activities: product development; factory design and analysis; and training of workers. Furthermore it will provide support for data analysis, visualization, advanced interaction and presence within the VE, ergonomics analysis and collaborative decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]