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To accommodate increasing product specialization, modern factories are increasingly becoming more flexible. Much of this flexibility is achieved by integrating the components of the manufacturing system (e.g., design, production, purchasing, etc). To be successful in this new manufacturing environment, an engineering college graduate must understand the total business process from design to production to delivery in order to develop a holistic view of manufacturing systems. Yet, traditional pedagogical tools are ill-equipped to develop this holistic view in students. In this paper, we describe a Virtual Factory Teaching System, VFTS, now under development to provide a tool to illustrate the concepts of factory management and design in a realistic setting. The focus of this paper is to present our pedagogical approach of the VFTS, the development of the prototype, and its use in a senior-level industrial engineering class.

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