VIMANA, formerly System Insights (SI), collaborates with NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and other partners on the Smart Manufacturing Test Bed, a project with the common goals of enabling the digital thread and transferring the learnings to the manufacturing industry for improvement in its business performance and global competitive advantage.
The Smart Manufacturing Systems (SMS) Test Bed was launched by NIST, a non-regulatory agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The Test Bed is an innovative model factory that will facilitate the advanced manufacturing technology known as the ‘digital thread’, which refers to the information life cycle processes from design, through manufacturing and inspection. The goal of the Test Bed is to create a shared resource for smart manufacturing research and development, accessible to those who want to explore capabilities as well as contribute to its advancement. The Test Bed is designed to be the foundation for fostering the acceptance and use of the digital thread, a technological advance predicted to yield significant operational and bottom-line benefits for manufacturers of all sizes.
VIMANA and NIST’s collaborative effort generated the MTConnectR package, which provides a solution to analyze data from machine tools, using the MTConnect standard to collect data from machine tools and bring the data into R, the statistical analysis package. This solution will enable one part of the digital thread concept – connecting the as-planned to the as-fabricated state. For more details about MTConnectR, read the blog.
The test bed overall will support the next planned stage of recently started collaborative effort between VIMANA and NIST that will collect data and power analytics. VIMANA’s collaboration with NIST and the ecosystem of partners will help manufacturers transform to digital, data driven manufacturing. The MTConnectR package will be enhanced to integrate with VIMANA platform, that collects, enriches and analyzes data from advanced manufacturing equipment, enabling decision to improve productivity.
“We are very excited to work with NIST on this Test Bed. We see this as a great start to advance the use of analytics to drive insight and to integrate technology and processes across the digital thread so manufacturers can outpace the competition and reduce costs. We value the opportunity provided by the NIST Test Bed to innovate and enable the future of manufacturing, as well as build learnings into future products for our customers.” — Dr. Athulan Vijayaraghavan, Founder and CTO, VIMANA.
According to NIST, future plans for the Test Bed include offering manufacturers the opportunity to compare the fabrication of test products using their standard procedure and with an optimized ‘digital thread’ plan.
To learn more about the SMS Test Bed, please go here.
