The development of a company layout is a crucial issue during Product Lifecycle Management. When introducing a new product or innovating the current onewhilst respecting the digital factory concept there is a need for stepping through more phases from a technical point of view: construction, technology and digital manufacturing design. This paper deals with the digital manufacturing design stage only - which consists mainly of the development of the manufacturing layout. The manufacturing design stage can be divided into: Rough plannin, Fine planning, Ergonomic Analyses and Discrete Simulation Validation [Kurkin 2010a]. All these stages can be supported by Virtual Reality hardware and software tools. This paper presents a method for producing simulations of factory design with a new self-developed procedure. The first version of an automatic convertor was also developed. This convertor can convert a layout designed with the aid of commercial off the shelf software visTableto a particular environment.
Science Journal 