Factory planning through paper-based computer-aided sketching

Abstract

Sketching has long served as a means to quickly express ideas in the early stages of design. Whilst CAD systems offer visualization capabilities that are not offered by a sketch, such technology is not exploited in the early stages, as it does not allow sketching as input. For this reason, Computer Aided Sketching (CAS) technology has been developed to combine the benefits of sketching with CAD. Yet, although this technology has been applied in a range of domains (such as architecture, product design, graphical user-interface design etc.), it has not yet been exploited for shop floor planning. In view of this, the research disclosed in this paper concerns the on-going development of a framework allowing users to quickly have a 3D CAD model of a factory directly from paper-based sketches of the factory. A visual language was developed such that it allows factory designers to schematically represent the shop floor, whilst at the same time facilitates off-line computer-processing of the sketches.