Enhancing Industrial Operator Training through BIM-Enriched Virtual Reality Scenes

In today's evolving industrial landscape, enhancing workforce resilience by improving the ability to navigate complex and unforeseen scenarios, is essential. This paper explores the role of training, especially during disruptions, introducing an innovative approach that combines Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Virtual Reality (VR). This aims to ease the creation of automatic BIM-enriched VR training environments. However, this process revealed some technical challenges that need to be addressed for an effective implementation. Therefore, this paper covers the theoretical background of VR and BIM, their common applications, and develops the conceptual basis of BIM-enriched VR models. A prototype of this integration has been developed, based on the case study proposed. This allowed to highlight the challenges the paradigm entails and for the definition of suggestions to overcome them. Copyright (C) 2024 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)