Knowledge Integration for Virtual Environment Construction

The major challenges in designing and implementing an applicable virtual environment for industrial applications are to enhance the environment-based knowledge representation and its acquisition capacity and, paradoxically, the simplification of the environment construction, configuration and information management processes. This paradox has lead to a search for an appropriate strategy for a practical environment construction method and related implementation platform. This paper describes such a new virtual environment construction approach – domain- analysis that is based on a top-down environment construction - for manufacturing applications. This approach reduces the effort to rapidly construct a virtual manufacturing environment using an application domain-analysis based approach to enable a virtual environment and its virtual objects to be organised and managed in a database for connecting with other data sources.