VFF: Virtual Factory Framework

The current complex market highlights the need of software tools supporting product engineering and manufacturing during the various stages of product and factory lifecycles. These are designed focusing on specific tasks, thus missing to satisfy the requirements of networked collaboration and concurrent engineering for the design and management of products, processes and production systems. A major challenge consists in the integration and harmonisation of the knowledge related to the factory of industrial companies by using a variety of multidisciplinary software tools. The topic is addressed by software providers and the scientific community, as demonstrated by the European project “Virtual Factory Framework” (VFF) that aims at developing an integrated framework to implement the next generation virtual factory. This paper describes the motivations behind the VFF concepts, together with the goals and the first results. Finally, it is presented how the Virtual Factory will be permanently synchronised with the Real Factory to validate its expected time and cost savings during the factory lifecycle phases.