Manufacturing Systems: From Sustainable to Smart

This talk is organized into two parts. In Part one, I will describe the objective of the “smart” manufacturing and the proposed NNMI Institute for Smart Manufacturing: Advanced Sensors, Controls, Platforms, and Modeling for Manufacturing. Smart manufacturing is an emerging field that combines physical systems with big data and intelligence. It can mean different things to different people. It is also referred to as Advanced Manufacturing, Digital Manufacturing, Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), the Internet of Things (IoT) and in Europe “Industrie 4.0.” Smart Manufacturing has the potential to fundamentally change how products are designed, manufactured, supplied, used, remanufactured and eventually retired. 

 

In part two, I will focus on research related to resource efficiency, especially sustainability in manufacturing. Industrial interest in sustainable manufacturing has increased dramatically in recent years, yet the supporting infrastructure and methodologies are still evolving. Ensuring sustainable manufacturing requires an integrated systems approach and spans technical, economic, ecological, and societal issues. Interactions within and across these issues are critical to the fundamental understanding of sustainable manufacturing, because focusing on any single issue could result in suboptimal solutions and the resulting unintended consequences. Industry recognizes that (1) sustainability challenges in manufacturing can only be addressed through multi-disciplinary methodologies and (2) implementing these methodologies require “smart” technologies to enable significant economic benefits for sustainability in general and sustainable manufacturing in particular. It is natural to combine smart and sustainable manufacturing to fully realize efficiency at all levels of manufacturing system.