Integration of Virtual Reality in a Knowledge-based Engineering Approach for Preliminary Design and Quotation of Assembly Plants

The worldwide market forces companies to deliver high quality quotation services to their potential customer. In fact, they should provide a range of different offers respecting tight lead-time. If the product to be marketed belongs to the so-called category of the “complex systems”, the bidding process may be challenging. The manufacturing plants are part of that class: their design involves many activities and results in the physical layout of the plant. In the last years, researchers put an increasing effort on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools for automatically designing, optimizing and giving quotes of manufacturing plant layout. Knowledge based Engineering (KBE) oriented to automatic configuration of products is a powerful technology can tackle those issues. In literature, many studies treat about advantages of KBE approach and its integration within several industrial environments. Usually, those applications deal with the automatic generation of technical documentation (reports, CAD model, simulation outputs, and so on). Nowadays, high bidding success rates go beyond the merely technical aspect.