Support in promoting flexible manufacturing systems Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) is a major Taiwanese research institute with research fields ranging from mechanical engineering to material science, biomedics, electronics and green energy. Their machine tool technology center focuses on machine, robot and controller design to provide customers with small flexible manufacturing cells. To promote their flexible manufacturing system by presenting their offering more visually, ITRI adopted Visual Components as their design and development environment. They have also implemented an add-on module, which allows the software to connect directly to ITRI’s CNC and robot controllers. In total, the implementation took about three months to complete. It is easy to start using Visual Components 3D visualization tools.Dr. ShuoPeng Liang, Manager, Department of Intelligent Machine Supported by a comprehensive training course and online documentation, adopting the Visual Components 3D simulation software was easier than expected. So far ITRI have been using the ready-made components provided with the online component library but in the future they are planning to also model their own components. Cyber-physical manufacturing research While their main use of the software is presenting their manufacturing solutions to potential customers, ITRI also sees a plenty of potential in using Visual Components in their future research. Their research project, funded in part by the government of Taiwan, focuses on creating new cyber-physical manufacturing systems (CPS). As it brings information from the machinery on the factory floor to computer systems, CPS is one of the key building blocks of Industry 4.0. Their long term vision is to build a factory floor simulator, which connects to multiple machines and multiple controllers simultaneously.