Project Overview
The European project DiFac (Digital Factory for human-oriented production system) aims at the development of an innovative Collaborative Manufacturing Environment (CME) for next generation digital manufacturing. The DiFac CME is used as a framework to support group work in an immersive and interactive way, for concurrent product design, prototyping and manufacturing, as well as worker training. It provides support for data analysis, visualization, advanced interaction and presence within the virtual environment, ergonomics analysis, and collaborative decision-making.
The key project figures are:
- Duration: 1 May 2006 – 30 June 2009
- Project number: FP6-2005-IST-5-035079 (funded under the European Commission Sixth Framework Programme)
- Strategic objective: 2.5.9 Collaborative Working Environments
- Consortium: 12 partners from 7 European countries, respectively: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Istituto di Tecnologie Industriali e Automazione (Italy), MASA Group S.A. (France), MTA Számítástechnikai és Automatizálási Kutató Intézet (Hungary), The University of Nottingham (United Kingdom), University of Patras Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems & Automation (Greece), Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. Institut für Produktionstechnik und Automatisierung (Germany), Technology Transfer System S.R.L. (Italy), Ropardo S.R.L. (Romania), V-Fab GmbH (Germany), Metaio GmbH (Germany), Prima Industrie S.p.A. (Italy), Pantelis Pashalidis & Sons S.A. (Greece).
MASA Group is responsible of:
- The technical management of the overall DiFac project.
- The development of the Factory Emergency Training tool, part of the Training Simulator component of the DiFac framework.
Challenges
Emergency training in factories is currently very rudimentary. In most cases, safety managers re-issue each year a disaster mitigation plan to comply with current legislation. This plan contains a possible mitigation strategy that several experts consider as the optimal solution for the problem at hand.
This assertion is often fragile: this was unfortunately demonstrated by many large-scale industrial disasters that occurred in the past twenty years. In fact, real-life exercises are time and human resource consuming, while being limited in their effects. Moreover, incident scenarios are often constrained for cost and practical reasons. Yet, training is more than ever necessary since employees encounter less and less real incidents due to the increasing quality of risk prevention.
Procedures, techniques and situation assessment skills must be easily and repetitively tested without endangering trainees, and without the need for expensive real-size training infrastructures. For the DiFac demonstration case, the end-user is a factory, where some employees are responsible for fire safety. The end-user would like to train these employees to respond to a factory fire using a thorough but cost-effective method.
Solution
The Factory Emergency Training Simulator is used to train workers at various occupational safety and health procedures, in particular in emergency situations. It can take as input a real factory layout. It is used for evacuation training in the premises of Compa, a Romanian manufacturer of machine parts for large automotive and appliances companies.
The training system is a typical client-server architecture, composed of, on one hand, a simulation server, and on the other hand, two types of clients (for instructor and trainee), providing visualisation and general services for interacting with the simulation. An editor allows specifying or modifying training scenarios, and an after-action-review tool allows detailed review and evaluation of the training results.
The typical use case involves one instructor and one trainee, possibly interacting via audio and video channels. Since the simulation also provides a self-training mode, it allows one instructor to supervise several trainees at the same time, while still being able to review with each of them their training results.
Key Benefits
- Provides a complementary approach to real-life exercises which usually requires costly real-world procedures.
- Allows individualized training in situations where it is either dangerous or very costly to stop the current processes.
- Enable instructors to perform in-depth individual trainings without the burden of animating the low-level details of the training scenario.
Downloads
DiFac project presentation video
DiFac factory emergency training video