摘要：In a manufacturing system (MS), a wide range of human activities are applied in production processes. The human factor plays a core role and should be incorporated into the design, planning and decision making processes. In this work we describe different definitions, developments and existing concepts of a Virtual Factory (VF) and discuss VFs from the human oriented point of view. Furthermore, we analyze the potential need and use of visualization methods in VF study and propose a human-centered VF concept. Following this concept we introduce an example implementation and describe how our model facilitates the decision making and design process in MS. In addition, we show an example of a noise analysis of working environment, which is based on our virtual factory model.
