Serious Games and Virtual Simulator for Automotive Manufacturing Education & Training

Manufacturing industry is facing important challenges in terms of sustainability, flexibility, ramp-up and time-to-market shortening. This is pushing RTD towards digital tools and methods to simulate and test production processes before-hand and thus bridging the gaps between manufacturing engineering and production. For example, virtual training offers a huge potential to reduce the time and effort of traditional hardware training and thus leading to shorter production ramp-up time. However, before being deployed in an industrial environment, virtual training systems need to prove their reliability and user acceptance. The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of gaming experience on the learning process of a manufacturing operation using the VIrtual Simulation and TRAining (VISTRA) system, a serious game that simulates manufacturing environments in order to train operators to perform manual tasks. The simulated operations take place at a welding workstation for truck chassis parts, where automation and manual tasks are combined. The case study aims then to evaluate the impact of gaming-experience and the general usability of the VISTRA system. Ten operators participated in the study; each operator completed five different training scenes on three difficulty levels each. Completion time and mistake count were computed by the VISTRA system after completing each training scene. This information was analyzed and compared. Results showed that: (1) users without gaming experience took considerably more time to complete the sequences than users with gaming experience, (2) the same amount of mistakes were made by gamers and by no-gamers, and (3) 50% of the mistakes were made during a particular scene. The study thus found that gaming experience influences positively on training completion time using the VISTRA system. The particularities on the mistake count demonstrated that gaming experience does not influence the understanding of the manufacturing operation. Usability issues found on users' feedback are further discussed in terms of visualization, tools and parts, assisted-learning and ergonomics. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.