A Petri Net Based Interactive Manager Model for Virtual Maintenance Environment Application

Interaction is one of the most important characteristic of VR system. In this paper, a kind of Hierarchical Timed Color Petri Net (HTCPN) is defined and an Interactive Manager Model (IMM) of Virtual Maintenance Environment (VME) is established based on HTCPN. With the inputs including operation data from dataglove, collision information between objects and recognized assembly relationship, the IMM output concrete operation event to realize the interactive actions in VME such as navigation, dragging, assembling and disassembling. The practice test illustrate that IMM satisfied the requirements of VME such as real-time and incurrent, as well as realized the treatment of numerous discrete events and the capture of operation intend during virtual maintenance operation.