Towards the Industrial Metaverse: A proposal and preliminary validation of its architecture for immersive virtual commissioning of production systems

The growing demand for innovative and customized products is intensifying the need for flexibility in modern production systems, emphasizing the relevance of rapid validation before their physical commissioning. To address this challenge, virtual commissioning has emerged as promising solution. In this context, this study proposes an immersive virtual commissioning architecture that extends traditional approaches of virtual commissioning. Specifically, it introduces the validation of human-machine interactions as an additional element of the traditional virtual commissioning process, by enabling active human involvement during simulations via Virtual Reality. A preliminary validation of the architecture is conducted in a laboratory setting, where the logical and kinematic behaviors of a production machine, along with human-machine interactions, are tested. The immersive virtual commissioning architecture contributes to improve production systems design by incorporating human-machine interactions validation prior to the physical installation, unlike current practices, which address this aspect only after the physical deployment. Future work should investigate comparative analyses against existing virtual commissioning architecture to demonstrate the benefits of active human involvement and to quantify improvements in cost and time through application in industrial contexts