Human-machine system design: The integrated use of human factors, virtual environments and product lifecycle management

Virtual environments open new possibilities for taking account of the human early in the product design. This paper provides a brief insight into the research in this area conducted by the Human-Machine Interaction and Virtual Engineering team at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. The paper describes the methods and approaches that are applied in case examples, leading to a number of benefits for the industry, such as faster time-to-market, better usability, and improved information sharing and knowledge creation. The vision is to design for humans in the context of human-system interaction. This vision both develops and applies the multidiscipline distributed framework and platform for the integrated use of virtual environments, human factors, and product lifecycle management.