Contribution of Virtual Reality for Lines Production’s Simulation in a Lean Manufacturing Environment

—In an increasingly competitive world, the responsiveness has become essential to improve the performance of companies. Accordingly a large number of companies have implemented the Lean approach. This approach is a production management method based on waste elimination and just-in-time production. This leads manufacturers to update and adapt their ways of production management and so reorganize the production lines to reduce costs, minimize delays as well as optimize their flexibility. To do this, the use of the Virtual Reality (VR) in the lines production's simulation would offer many advantages. Thus, this technology would allow users to interact with simulation model in real-time and in a 3D format. However, few works have integrated virtual reality in the field of simulation in Lean manufacturing environment. The objective of this paper is to propose a method of simulation of production flows in a virtual environment in real time. To this end, we will review the traditional industrial tools in the field of production simulation. Then we will present the main advantages of using the VR to the manufacturing processes in a lean environment. Finally a global software solution which integrates VR will be proposed and an example of its application to simulate lines production in VR will be presented.