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In this paper, three surveys were carried out at the Darmstadt University of Technology to reveal the problems regarding the implementation of DFE. It furthermore attempts to bridge the gap between approaches mainly proposed by researches from university and the current practice in industry. The first survey gives a good overview about current DFE practice in companies with certified environmental management systems (EMS). The second survey summarizes the general experience of consultants from university and industry, who are well-versed in implementing methods in industry. The third and last survey was carried out at ‘environmental champions’ and inspects the differences between the individual applications. With these three surveys as a background, an approach for successful implementation of DFE will be derived. Finally, the concept is divided into different levels of implementation, based on the prerequisites of the company and the effort the company is willing to invest. Therefore, the concept can be used by large companies, as well as by small- and medium-sized companies.

This paper describes an interactive virtual environment for modeling and designing factories and shop floors. The factory building tool is developed as an open architecture in which various modules can be utilized to quickly implement factory design algorithms ranging from plant layout to factory flow analysis. Software modules and utilities have been implemented to allow easy set-up of the visual interface. In this paper, this virtual factory is used to implement cellular manufacturing (CM) system. CM has traditionally been a very complicated system to implement in practice. However successful implementation of the system has improved productivity immersely. Several issues involved in implementing CM within our virtual factory machine modeling and interface designs for defining the cells, are discussed. The mathematical clustering algorithm called Modified Boolean Method was implemented to automatically generate complex virtual environments. The virtual factory makes the process of CM-based factory design a very easy and intuitive process. Though the cell formation problem is NP-complete in 2D space, issues related to human factors and ergonomics can be better perceived in a 3D virtual environment. It also leads to further optimization with respect to maintainability and performance, and thus help get better solutions, which are not visible unless the factory is built. Our virtual factory interface also allows easy reassignment of machines and parts, subcontracting of bottleneck parts and rearranging of machines within the same design environment, making this a productive industrial tool. 3D virtual factory can also be automatically generated from the Part Machine interface called the Virtual Matrix Interface.