The Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology today announced four new industry-sponsored projects that will receive cost-shared funding to work on experimental, highly flexible technologies to simplify the task of integrating and sharing "real time" data among many different planning, tracking and control systems for the nation's manufacturing industries. The awards are made under the department's Advanced Technology Program.
"The projects we're announcing today will impact some of our nation's largest industries, including electronics and transportation, with over $1 trillion in annual sales and accounting for about one of every three manufacturing jobs," said Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown. "We are pleased to join with these companies and universities in an effort to truly join the industrial revolution with the information revolution for the benefit of our nation's industry."
A government/private-sector partnership program aimed at stimulating economic growth and job creation, the ATP supports strategic, high- risk research in cutting-edge technologies. Today's awards are part of the five-year ATP program on Technologies for the Integration of Manufacturing Applications or TIMA. Modern computer and information technologies have enabled the automation of several aspects of manufacturing, including enterprise information systems geared towards management and long-range planning, and equipment control. More recently, a class of software applications referred to as Manufacturing Execution Systems has evolved to automate the processes in between-- namely, to track, manage and schedule jobs on the shop floor in real-time. While MES provides manufacturers with critical functionality the technology to integrate these applications with each other and throughout the enterprise is conspicuously absent, placing robust manufacturing automation solutions out of reach for 90% of the country's manufacturing sites.
Current attempts to integrate MES applications into a factory's automation framework tend to produce proprietary, monolithic systems that are either custom-built, tied to particular hardware and software combinations, or specially customized to fit an existing situation. None of these solutions meets the needs of the nation's hundreds of thousands of small and mid-sized manufacturers, who typically do not have the resources to entirely rebuild their existing factory systems or for the complex task of integrating their existing (and future) business and factory systems into a seamless solution. The TIMA program fosters industrial R&D on potentially far-reaching technologies that would offer all manufacturers affordable "plug-and-play" solutions to MES integration.
The advanced Technology Program provides cost-shared funding to industry for high-risk R&D projects with the potential to spark important, broad- based economic benefits for the United States. The ATP does not fund product-development. The ATP accelerates, and in many cases enables, potentially important R&D projects that industry otherwise would not undertake, or would not devote significant resources to, because of the technical risks involved. ATP awards are made on the basis of a rigorous competitive review considering scientific and technical merit of each and its potential benefits for the U.S. economy. Applicants must include a credible business plan for bringing the new technology to market with their own funds once technical milestones have been achieved under ATP support.
ATP focused programs concentrate resources on key technical barriers and business challenges in specific technologies judged by industry to offer the potential for major economic benefits to the nation. All current ATP focused programs were established in 1994 and will run for about five years.
If carried through to completion, the four projects announced today will cost nearly $31 million in cost-sharing by private industry and and additional $31 million in ATP funding. Three of the awards will go to joint ventures. Nineteen organizations will directly participate in the research, including five small businesses and three universities. The awards and dollar values announced today are contingent on the signing of formal agreements between NIST and the project proposers.
A list of the selected projects is attached.
As a non-regulatory agency of the Commerce Department's Technology Administration, NIST promotes U.S. economic growth by working with industry to develop and apply technology, measurements and standards.
US IBM MANUFACTURING SOLUTIONS UNIT - CHARLOTTE, NC
ATP - An Agent-Based Framework for Integrated Intelligent Planning-
Execution
Technologies: Computer-integrated manufacturing
Project length: 3 years
ATP funds: $11,046 K
Cost-shared funds (est.) $11,867 K
Total project funds (est.) $22,913 K
In today's global business environment, companies must learn to adapt rapidly to changing markets and opportunities. Agility in manufacturing is key to the success of U.S. companies, particularly small and medium-sized manufacturers, competing with lower-cost foreign producers.
While developing flexible frameworks to integrate manufacturing information and control systems is a necessary first step, a coalition of manufacturers and application software solution developers led by the IBM Manufacturing Solutions Unit argues it is not sufficient. Current manufacturing planning processes are too inflexible, operating on a weekly or monthly basis while true agile manufacturing requires dynamic scheduling and planning on a daily or hourly basis. The agile factory must link real-time manufacturing information with both planning and execution systems.
This consortium proposes to develop the basic algorithms and technologies for linking agile planning systems with the wealth of real-time factory-floor information provided by manufacturing execution systems (MES). The two main objectives are to develop a self- configuring plug-and-play MES framework based upon intelligent software agents, and to develop the basic enabling technologies for Integrated Intelligent Planning-Execution (IIPE) applications using this framework. The framework will require developing the largely experimental technology of intelligent software agents (programs that interact with each other to configure themselves into a working system with a minimum of user involvement) into something robust and reliable enough for the demands of a real- time manufacturing control system.
The IIPE will require similarly robust and reliable algorithms and software to assimilate a wide variety of inputs on the current state of the factory, resource needs and deadlines, and develop a plan to optimize the use of existing resources. The IIPE framework and applications will be designed with the needs of small and mid-sized manufacturers in mind, by providing a solution that is both affordable and low-maintenance. The successful adoption of IIPE, say consortium members, could increase manufacturing efficiency by 30 percent, reduce work in progress by 30 percent, and, if fully implemented, would save the manufacturing industry billions of dollars.
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