Comparing the Technical and Business Effects of Working with Immersive Virtual Reality Instead of, or in Addition to LayCAD in the Factory Design Process

Abstract: Scania needs to reconfigure their factories quickly to meet the future demands of the market. The process of reconfiguring factories starts with the factory layouts. Factory design is a complicated detail-oriented process, and if major physical changes on the factory floor and installations fail, it affects the entire production flow. It is an expensive and time consuming process to rectify these errors. Hence, it is extremely important that the installations are both quick and accurate. So, Scania wants to investigate how Immersive Virtual Reality could be used in the Factory layout design process. This thesis addresses how to utilize VR with existing technologies at Scania, by mapping the capabilities of VR to the needs of Scania. A function of interest to Scania is the possibility to import data, such as Point Clouds, CAD Objects and Factory Layouts, to create a coordinated VR platform. After understanding the VR technology, it was proved possible to import and visualize all of these data, after exporting it to a format that was readable by the VR system. Once the VR platform was setup, based on the imported models, the next step was to evaluate the aspects of working with VR, as compared to working with Scania’s Factory CAD system –“LayCAD”. It was assessed that the Immersive VR system offers better visualization, evaluation and realization of layout changes, compared to the LayCAD system. But the use of VR requires additional skills, time and cost to setup the VR platform. Based on the degree of maturity of the VR technology and the current state of Scania, it was concluded that VR cannot yet serve as a standalone solution for layouts within Scania. For an efficient factory development process, it is more appropriate to work with both systems in combination, where Immersive VR is used as an additional visualization or verification tool for presenting and evaluating conceptual layouts.