Infrastructure for Agile Manufacturing Data Standards

Summary

Manufacturing systems need to transform towards a new service-oriented architecture to benefit from new smart manufacturing technologies such as IIoT, AI, and Big Data Analytics. A service-oriented manufacturing system (SOMS) is a dynamic composition of networked manufacturing software and cyber-physical components offered as services. Transformation to SOMS is necessary if manufacturing systems are to respond effectively to dynamic market demands and disruptions. Although manufacturers can see the benefits the new architecture may bring, they face several difficulties in making the transformation, one of which is the cost and time necessary to constructing and integrating the services via message standards. This project will address this issue by developing measurement science, methods, and tools to enable faster and less expensive message standard developments and uses.

Description

Objective - To develop and deploy to industry advances in standards and measurement science for model-based messaging standards and service-modeling methodology to enable manufacturers to improve the agility of manufacturing systems and manufacturing systems integration.

What is the technical idea?  

The core of the technical idea is to develop methods and tools that enable agile standard life-cycle management Research will be conducted leading to new standards and methods that allow for more precise and cost-effective description, qualification, and quantification of a message standard functional characteristics and the quality of those characteristics. As the SOMS will exploit the economy of services, standards supporting it must also be agile. New models, computational methods, and tools will be developed to allow for more cost-effective management of the service descriptions along with their respective message standards.

What is the research plan? 

The project employs three tracks of research that feed into each other: 1) New methods and standards for service characterization; 2) New methods and tools for agile manufacturing and supply chain operations standard development and use; and 3) New methods and tools for managing mapping artifacts.

 1) New methods and standards for service characterization

In this track, model-based service description management will be considered. The objective is to be able to capture service description in a platform independent representation so that companies can speed up the service description authoring and quickly scale to different service-orientation platforms.

In addition, project members will work with the Open Application Group Inc. (OAGi) Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) working group to research on the feasibility to derive, simpler micro-service standards from existing manufacturing and supply chain operation standards. Such standards will provide a ground for the services economy (also known as the APIs Economy), making it possible for SMEs to partake in the smart manufacturing revolution.

2) New methods and tools for agile standard development and use

In this track, project members will work with manufacturing industry standards consortia to gather requirements and develop a new common workflow for a standards development and use process that is applicable for the shopfloor to the top-floor processes. Required standards development and use infrastructure will be developed and demonstrated.  Additionally, research will be conducted to find new methods that exploit standards-usage-related data (e.g., standards’ comments, reviews, and usage documentations) to speed up and enhance reliability of the resulting standards and its use in smart manufacturing settings. The resulting tool will support activities in (1).

 3) New methods and tools for mapping artifacts management

Mapping is one of the most time-consuming tasks in SOMS transformation. There are a few kinds of mappings including, for example, business term mapping and data transformation mapping.  This track seeks to develop innovative solutions to speed up these mapping activities. For example, there is a gap in standardized form of mapping specification that provides a commonly understandable format between subject domain expert, software developers, and downstream data transformation mapping tool.