Benefits and Use Cases

The E3012-16 standard was designed to be applicable across industries and manufacturing processes.  The evolving standard was applied in a number of different industrial settings including pulp and paper [1], stone product [2], injection modeling [3,6], alloy surface inspection [4], additive manufacturing [5], and die casting [7].  The research highlighted the following objectives of the standard:

• facilitate communication between different stakeholders by providing a uniform and consistent documentation format,
• link a number of unit manufacturing processes together to develop system models that characterize specific production plans for discrete, batch, or continuous production, and
• generate data sets to represent environmental impacts of the processes, comparable to LCI data sets.

The standard may be of particular interest to the software providers from manufacturing industries that provide analysis and modeling and/or simulation solutions to manufacturers. The standard format promotes information exchange and communication for decision making purposes. 

The standard will show even more benefit over time as UMP models are collected. We envision different organizations building up their own repositories of UMP models unique to their systems.  Such a repository would potentially reduce modeling time and improve model verification and validation activities.  Industries may also come up with a set of standard models of common processes.  Text books that are available today describe different types of processes.  With the standard the information found in text books could be represented more formally as UMP models. 

Application of the standard may result in reduced operational costs, improved prediction of product costs, improved scheduling maximizing manufacturing resources, improved control of product quality, and better transfer of best practices. Examples showing these benefits were recently documented [1].  These benefits have been seen in other work on modeling manufacturing processes [8].  The standard provides a uniform and repeatable way for more practitioners to reap these benefits.

We are seeking partners interested in collaborating in developing more case studies based specifically on the E3012-16 standard.