The Smart Factory Shifts from Reactive to Predictive – An ASME and NIST Workshop

Michael Brundage, Ph.D. and Brian Weiss, Ph.D., NIST

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), in collaboration with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, hosted a “Workshop on Advanced Monitoring, Diagnostic, and Prognostic Technologies”, on June 8-9, 2017, at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together key subject matter experts to identify manufacturing needs and wants with respect to advanced monitoring, diagnostic, and prognostic technologies (collectively known as Prognostics and Health Management (PHM)), along with ways of verifying and validating their performance to enhance maintenance and control strategies within manufacturing operations at the factory‐floor.

Smart Manufacturing Isn’t So Smart Without Standards

By Simon Frechette, KC Morris, and Yan Lu (NIST)

Manufacturers face ever-increasing demands of variability—greater customization, smaller lot sizes, sudden supply-chain changes and disruptions. Successful manufacturers will need to incorporate new technologies that help them quickly adapt to rapid change and to elevate product quality while optimizing use of energy and other resources. These technologies form the core of emerging “smart” manufacturing systems. 

Smart manufacturing is composed of information-centric systems that maximize the flow and re-use of data throughout an enterprise. Manufacturing enterprises today, both large and small, are made up of disparate components. The ability of these disparate systems to exchange, understand, and exploit product, production, and business data rests critically on information standards. 

Smart Manufacturing Systems (SMS) are driving unprecedented gains in production agility, quality, and efficiency. Smart manufacturing defines a vision of next-generation manufacturing with enhanced capabilities. It is built on IoT and digital technology, but enabled by combining the individual manufacturing technologies.