The success of the 1st International Workshop on Virtual Manufacturing (VIRMAN’06 – http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/VirMan06/) was more than superseded by the success of the 2nd International Workshop on Virtual Manufacturing (VIRMAN’08 ) held on 8th October, 2008 in Turin, Italy. This was run as part of the 5th International Conference and Workshop on Virtual Reality (http://www.intuition2008.net/site/default.asp) which was organised by the EU-funded Framework 6 INTUITION VR Network (http://www.intuition-eunetwork.net/index.php).

Background and Context of the Workshop

Cost effective VR technologies are now becoming available and will revolutionise the manner in which the products of the future will be designed and manufactured. Virtual manufacturing in the context of this workshop means the utilisation of VR in all of its guises as a means for providing useful engineering data at all of the stages of the product manufacturing lifecycle from specification and conceptual design through manufacturing to product support and disposal. This will become even more important as companies move towards the product-service paradigm of the future. Virtual manufacturing research work has been characterised by a diverse range of interested engineering specialisms. It has also seen the rise and fall of a number of vendors, yet the nature and extent of sustained uptake by industry is still unclear. Much of the research has been conceptual in nature, proving principles and pointing the way towards potential applications and methods of analysis whilst more recent work has begun to demonstrate cost-effective interactive applications.

The goal of this workshop wasto provide an opportunityfor researchers and industry practitioners from the EU and USA to meet together in one forum to explore both the state-of-the-art and the state-of-the-practice in virtual manufacturing in its widest technological and applications context.

With 13 papers in three sessions plus a keynote a wide range of topics were covered, as can be seen from the programme schedule.

Copies of the Procedings for this workshop and the main INTUITION2008 conference can be found as follows:

Proceedings of the 2^nd International Workshop Virtual Manufacturing VirMan 08 - part of the 5^th INTUITION International Conference: Virtual Reality in Industry and Society: From Research to Application, October 6-8, 2008, Torino, Italy, ISBN 978-960-89028-7-9

The keynote speaker was Professor Sankar Jayaram, Washington State University, USA (http://www.mme.wsu.edu/people/faculty/faculty.html?jayaramS)

The abstract of his address can be found at: http://www.intuition2008.net/site/contenuto_view.asp?check=29.

The Digital Tools Manufacturing Group  (DTMG) of the SMI (SMI), Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK.