The development of digital technologies for manufacturing has been challenged by the difficulty of navigating the breadth of new technologies available to industry. This difficulty is compounded by technologies developed without a good understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the manufacturing environment, especially within small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs). This paper describes industrial case studies conducted to identify the needs, priorities, and constraints of manufacturing SMEs in the areas of performance measurement, condition monitoring, diagnosis, and prognosis. These case studies focused on contract and original equipment manufacturers with less than 500 employees from several industrial sectors. Solution and equipment providers and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) centers were also included. Each case study involved discussions with key shop-floor personnel as well as site visits with some participants. The case studies highlight SME's strong need for access to appropriate data to better understand and plan manufacturing operations. They also help define industrially-relevant use cases in several areas of manufacturing operations, including scheduling support, maintenance planning, resource budgeting, and workforce augmentation.
In order to maximize assets, manufacturers should use real-time knowledge garnered from ongoing and continuous collection and evaluation of factory-floor machine status data. In discrete parts manufacturing, factory machine monitoring has been difficult, due primarily to closed, proprietary automation equipment that make integration difficult. Recently, there has been a push in applying the data acquisition concepts of MTConnect to the real-time acquisition of machine status data. MTConnect is an open, free specification aimed at overcoming the "Islands of Automation" dilemma on the shop floor. With automated asset analysis, manufacturers can improve production to become lean, efficient, and effective. The focus of this paper will be on the deployment of MTConnect to collect real-time machine status to automate asset management. In addition, we will leverage the ISO 22400 standard, which defines an asset and quantifies asset performance metrics. In conjunction with these goals, the deployment of MTConnect in a large aerospace manufacturing facility will be studied with emphasis on asset management and understanding the impact of machine Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) on manufacturing.
This paper proposes an approach to integrating advanced process control solutions with optimization (APC-O) solutions, within any factory, to enable more efficient production processes. Currently, vendors who provide the software applications that implement control solutions are isolated and relatively independent. Each such solution is designed to implement a specific task such as control, simulation, and optimization - and only that task. It is not uncommon for vendors to use different mathematical formalisms and modeling tools that produce different data representations and formats. Moreover, instead of being modeled uniformly only once, the same knowledge is often modeled multiple times - each time using a different, specialized abstraction. As a result, it is extremely difficult to integrate optimization with advanced process control. We believe that a recent standard, International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 15746, describes a data model that can facilitate that integration. In this paper, we demonstrate a novel method of integrating advanced process control using ISO 15746 with numerical optimization. The demonstration is based on a chemical-process-optimization problem, which resides at level 2 of the International Society of Automation (ISA) 95 architecture. The inputs to that optimization problem, which are captured in the ISO 15746 data model, come in two forms: goals from level 3 and feedback from level 1. We map these inputs, using this data model, to a population of a meta-model of the optimization problem for a chemical process. Serialization of the metamodel population provides input to a numerical optimization code of the optimization problem. The results of this integrated process, which is automated, provide the solution to the originally selected, level 2 optimization problem.
Advances in information technology triggered a digital revolution that holds promise of reduced costs, improved productivity, and higher quality. To ride this wave of innovation, manufacturing enterprises are changing how product definitions are communicated - from paper to models. To achieve industry's vision of the Model-Based Enterprise (MBE), the MBE strategy must include model-based data interoperability from design to manufacturing and quality in the supply chain. The Model-Based Definition (MBD) is created by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) using Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools. This information is then shared with the supplier so that they can manufacture and inspect the physical parts. Today, suppliers predominantly use Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) and Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM) models for these tasks. Traditionally, the OEM has provided design data to the supplier in the form of two-dimensional (2D) drawings, but may also include a three-dimensional (3D)-shape-geometry model, often in a standards-based format such as ISO 10303-203:2011 (STEP AP203). The supplier then creates the respective CAM and CMM models and machine programs to produce and inspect the parts. In the MBE vision for model-based data exchange, the CAD model must include product-and-manufacturing information (PMI) in addition to the shape geometry. Today's CAD tools can generate models with embedded PMI. And, with the emergence of STEP AP242, a standards-based model with embedded PMI can now be shared downstream. The on-going research detailed in this paper seeks to investigate three concepts. First, that the ability to utilize a STEP AP242 model with embedded PMI for CAD-to-CAM and CAD-to-CMM data exchange is possible and valuable to the overall goal of a more efficient process. Second, the research identifies gaps in tools, standards, and processes that inhibit industry's ability to cost-effectively achieve model-based-data interoperability in the pursuit of the MBE vision. Finally, it also seeks to explore the interaction between CAD and CMM processes and determine if the concept of feedback from CAM and CMM back to CAD is feasible. The main goal of our study is to test the hypothesis that model-based-data interoperability from CAD-to-CAM and CAD-to-CMM is feasible through standards-based integration. This paper presents several barriers to model-based-data interoperability. Overall, the project team demonstrated the exchange of product definition data between CAD, CAM, and CMM systems using standards-based methods. While gaps in standards coverage were identified, the gaps should not stop industry's progress toward MBE. The results of our study provide evidence in support of an open-standards method to model-based-data interoperability, which would provide maximum value and impact to industry.