Starting with May 1st 2006, Wittmann & Partner is involved in a new project within the 6th Framework Programme, co-financed by the European Union. DiFac Digital Factory for Human Oriented Production System is a specific targeted research project, which is to be implemented during a three year period.
Wittmann & Partner is responsible for the Collaboration Manager component, also being the Work Package leader for Demonstration Activities. The consortium is made up of SMEs, research institutes and industrial end users from France, Italy, Hungary, UK, Greece and Germany.

A digital factory represents a persistent hybrid community where a rich virtualized environment representing a variety of factory activities will facilitate the sharing of factory resources, manufacturing information and knowledge and help the simulation of collaborative design, planning, production and management among different participants and departments.

DiFac aims at the development of an innovative Collaborative Manufacturing Environment (CME) for next generation digital manufacturing. The DiFac CME will be used as a framework to support group work in an immersive and interactive way, for concurrent product design, prototyping and manufacturing, as well as worker training. It will provide support for data analysis, visualization, advanced interaction and presence within the virtual environment, ergonomics analysis, and collaborative decision-making.