Construction and management of large-scale and complex virtual manufacturing environments.

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 led to a search for an appropriate strategy for a practical environment construction method and related implementation platform. This thesis 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 two steps: (i) application domain analysis, which
classifies the application to identify the environment specification, and top-down construction that is based on a ready-built template as the starting point; (ii) The
development of an integrated application development platform with various modules to enable a virtual environment and its virtual objects to be organised and managed in a database that can be connected with other data sources.