Interactive Simulation for Walk Path Planning within the Automotive Industry

For manufacturing industry, the increasing demand for mass-customization is currently leading to profound changes for production. As one consequence, the way in which the launch of a new product is planned, successively transforms from a hardware-based to an entirely digitized process. As one possibility to evaluate human factors in virtual environments, recent tracking and visualization technology (e.g. virtual reality) enables production planning departments to interactively validate and plan assembly processes. Furthermore, character animation and motion simulation approaches are representing a second promising area of research. Even tough offering many evident benefits, both groups reveal different drawbacks with respect to validity and completeness of the gathered results. To bridge this gap, this paper presents a generic concept unifying interactive validation and automatic simulations methods to a beneficial symbiosis. Furthermore, a rich continuum of operating modes is introduced which demonstrates the widespread options of implementation. The applicability of this novel approach is eventually evaluated for the use-case of walk path assessment in automotive production planning. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.