Research Insights

A manufactured product is the end of a long chain of interwoven manufacturing steps that may span geography, industries, and manufacturing processes. Each step may be optimized, yet for a step there may be uncertainty about the larger context of its contribution that if known during production would allow for greater efficiencies, better quality, and improved productivity. If a global system analysis and optimization could, in addition, be conducted cooperatively with each step during production, the end product and overall production would greatly benefit. Advances in hybrid distributed control and optimization, in highly networked cyber-physical systems, and in artificial intelligence and machine learning have opened new opportunities in cyber-enabled manufacturing. This Future Manufacturing Research Grant (FMRG) CyberManufacturing project connects and coordinates the ensemble of various manufacturing processes, operating at different manufacturing stages under a cyber-coordinated close-knit system, defined by an analytical framework, known as STREAM, a multi-stage distributed future manufacturing system. This project provides a public online repository that hosts the STREAM data, models, simulators, controllers, analytics, and empirical studies, and that facilitates sharing research experiences about STREAM with the research and industry communities. The project creates new outreach and workforce development activities for K-12, undergraduate and graduate students, as well as working professionals in the field of manufacturing. These research results will be included in the university curriculum for advanced manufacturing, architecture design, machine learning, simulation, and system control and optimization. This project is an interdisciplinary research project with three interconnected research tasks: (1) STREAM architecture design and implementation. There is a novel bridging middleware architecture to enable seamless machine interoperability, and software- and hardware-based accelerators will be built to enable efficient communication and computing in cyber-manufacturing systems. (2) STREAM modeling and quality control. There is a novel multi-layer functional graphical model to address the high-dimensional functional dependencies over STREAM machines and a spatial-temporal iterative learning control method to achieve an accurate and efficient process quality control. (3) STREAM simulation and production control. To handle the multi-level dynamic process interactions in the system that collectively meet process quality, cost, and resource constraints, there are coordinated, high-fidelity multi-resolution simulators, assisting with the hybrid control of STREAM production. These research tasks are validated in an open-source additive manufacturing testbed for the manufacture of high energy/power density supercapacitors. The modeling and analysis methodologies form a rigorous basis for continuous improvement of quality, manufacturability, and productivity of future multi-stage and distributed manufacturing systems.

Funder: National Science Foundation 

Amount: $2,333,085 

PI: Hongyue Sun, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Statistics