The Virtual Manufacturing concept: Scope, Socio-Economic Aspects and Future Trends

TL;DR

This paper explores Virtual Manufacturing's scope, socio-economic impacts, and future trends, emphasizing its role in modeling, simulation, and optimization of manufacturing processes to enhance efficiency and understanding.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of Virtual Manufacturing, including its definitions, socio-economic considerations, and future research directions.

Findings

Virtual Manufacturing models real-world processes using IT and simulation.

Socio-economic factors influence the adoption and development of VM.

Future trends include integration of advanced automation and AI in VM.

Abstract

The research area "Virtual Manufacturing (VM)'' is the use of information technology and computer simulation to model real world manufacturing processes for the purpose of analysing and understanding them. As automation technologies such as CAD/CAM have substantially shortened the time required to design products, Virtual Manufacturing will have a similar effect on the manufacturing phase thanks to the modelling, simulation and optimisation of the product and the processes involved in its fabrication. After a description of Virtual Manufacturing (definitions and scope), we present some socio-economic factors of VM and finaly some "hot topics'' for the future are proposed.