Remote machine monitoring and real-time supply chain visibility have become increasingly important strategies for manufacturers. The CESMII Smart Manufacturing Institute is seeing a renewed sense of urgency for digitizing manufacturing operations, and expects these technologies to be critical in helping America’s manufacturers build more resilient supply chains. CESMII’s new Smart Manufacturing Innovation Platform (SMIP) is poised to address these needs, and CESMII is currently seeking proposals for platform development projects that will be supported by $3.5M in federal funding.
Smart Manufacturing (SM) enables information about a manufacturing process to be available when it is needed, where it is needed, and in the form it is needed, across the entire manufacturing value-chain, to support smarter decisions. CESMII intends their new platform to democratize Smart Manufacturing by offering small to medium-sized manufacturers a valuable opportunity to take part in the digital transformation.
The SM Innovation Platform (SMIP) is an environment that allows individual pieces of operational technology (OT) to interoperate, moving data between the functional components. At the heart of the SMIP are SM Profiles, which are information models of individual OT components. Manufacturers will be able to access pre-developed SM Profiles and OT Applications in the platform’s SM Marketplace, a concept similar to an “app store”, to model their own equipment and processes.
CESMII is currently soliciting proposals for projects to improve the core capabilities of the platform (Wave 3 RFPs), and to develop the information models to address specific manufacturing use cases (Wave 4 RFPs). Of particular interest to manufacturers and machine builders, Wave 4 makes $2.5M available for up to 25 application projects, supporting collaborative project teams to develop new SM Profiles and OT Applications for particular manufacturing use cases.
These project teams should include a manufacturer, and one or more of the following: a systems integrator, an app vendor, a college or university, and a machine builder or Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). The manufacturer will target the assets and processes to be modeled based on their specific use case. The team will develop the models within the SMIP, giving the manufacturer a customized Smart Manufacturing solution, and adding to the shared pool of applications and equipment profiles available to others using the platform.
Small and medium manufacturers are particularly encouraged to identify use cases in their operations. These proof-of-concept projects should serve to help other manufacturers overcome barriers to adoption of SM technologies for improving performance, productivity, profitability, energy consumption/productivity, quality and so forth.
For more information, please visit https://www.cesmii.org/resources to download the Requests for Proposal, and contact the CESMII Northern Regional Manufacturing Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to indicate your interest.
Learn More
