Today's manufacturers face ever-increasing demands of variability-greater customization, smaller ... more Today's manufacturers face ever-increasing demands of variability-greater customization, smaller lot sizes, sudden supply-chain changes and disruptions. Successful manufacturers will have to choose and incorporate technologies that help them quickly adapt to rapid change and to elevate product quality while optimizing use of energy and resources. These technologies form the core of an emerging, information-centric, Smart Manufacturing System that maximizes the flow and re-use of data throughout the enterprise. The ability of disparate systems, however, to exchange, understand, and exploit product, production, and business data rests critically on information standards. This report provides a review of the body of pertinent standards-a standards landscape-upon which future smart manufacturing systems will rely. This landscape comprises integration standards within and across three manufacturing lifecycle dimensions: product, production system, and business. We discuss opportunities and challenges for new standards, and present emerging activities addressing these opportunities. This report will allow manufacturing practitioners to better understand those standards useful to integration of smart manufacturing technologies. Disclaimer Certain commercial systems are identified in this paper. Such identification does not imply recommendation or endorsement by NIST; nor does it imply that the products identified are necessarily the best available for the purpose. Further, any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NIST or any other supporting U.S. government or corporate organizations.
The NDRProfile schema provides a common syntax for exchanging, managing, and reusing XML Schema n... more The NDRProfile schema provides a common syntax for exchanging, managing, and reusing XML Schema naming and design rules (NDRs). NDRProfile, used by NIST's Quality of Design (QOD) application as a format for import and export of rule sets, is also useful for general exchange of NDRs and, with accompanying stylesheets and other materials, provides an environment for authoring and formatting NDR documentation. This paper describes the content of the NDRProfile schema and its various uses. Disclaimer Mention of commercial products or services in this document does not imply approval or endorsement by NIST, nor does it imply that such products or services are necessarily the best available for the purpose.
Global population growth and increasing resource scarcity are necessitating sustainable manufactu... more Global population growth and increasing resource scarcity are necessitating sustainable manufacturing and circular economy (CE) practices. These practices require the decisions made at each product life cycle (PLC) stage consider sustainability and circularity implications. We propose PLC system level optimization to identify the most favorable choices, instead of siloed individual PLC stage-specific optimizations. This should yield better circularity by permitting manufacturers to take a more holistic view and identify the areas of highest impact across the PLC. This paper presents initial work towards building a PLC system optimization framework. From an initial review of current circularity metrics, we identify metrics that are suitable for forming the optimization objectives. Second, we identify decision variables available to manufacturers across the PLC that are useful in optimizing the entire system's circularity and sustainability. Finally, we identify limitations of current metrics, and discuss major challenges and potential solutions to PLC system optimization problems.
The bottom up demand from consumers for more sustainable products, and the top down need to compl... more The bottom up demand from consumers for more sustainable products, and the top down need to comply with government regulations motivates manufacturers to adopt tools and methods to evaluate their operations for opportunities to reduce environmental impact and improve competitiveness. Manufacturers have actively improved the sustainability of their products through the use of such tools and methods. However recently, manufacturers are struggling to maintain the necessary gains in energy and material efficiency due to the assessment inaccuracies of current ad hoc methods and their inability to identify large sustainability improvement opportunities. Overcoming this barrier requires standardized methods and tools that are implementable and which contain accurate manufacturing process-level information. To aid in developing such methods and tools, this study contrasts the perspective of industry and academic research on the topics of sustainable manufacturing metrics and measurements, and process modeling to determine the deficits that exist in enacting academic theory to practice. Furthermore, this study highlights some of the industry responses to the development of related standards for sustainability assessment. Compare findings Industry Perspective Roundtable 1 (N=10) Roundtable 2 (N=10) Roundtable 3 (N=11) Report barriers and recommendations Literature Perspective Measuring Performance Metric Selection Methods & Tools Focus Topics Process Modeling Metrics and Measurements Literature Review Group Discussions
This report describes installation and use of the XML Schema [1] Quality of Design Standalone tes... more This report describes installation and use of the XML Schema [1] Quality of Design Standalone testing system, or QOD Standalone. QOD Standalone is one of several tools produced by NIST's XML Testbed project within the Manufacturing Systems Integration Division at NIST. These tools aid in producing high quality XML schemas using a standards-based approach to manufacturing systems integration. QOD may be used by an XML schema developer to ensure compliance with a set of guidelines for XML schema development, a.k.a. Naming and Design Rules (NDR). QOD Standalone, derived from the original web-based system, may be used for off-line testing, hence the name "Standalone." While the tool is configurable to use NDR from any number of original sources, it is distributed with tests of NDR from the Open Applications Group (OAG) [2] and Department of the Navy (DON) [3]. Tests for other NDR may be loaded into the system as they are available.
Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Sep 1, 2016
Smart manufacturing is defined by high degrees of automation. Automation, in turn, is defined by ... more Smart manufacturing is defined by high degrees of automation. Automation, in turn, is defined by clearly defined processes. The use of standards in this environment is not just commonplace, but essential to creating repeatable processes and reliable systems. As with the rest of society, manufacturing systems are becoming more tightly connected through advances in information and communication technologies (ICT). As a result, manufacturers are able to receive information from their business partners and operational units much more quickly and are expected to respond quickly as well. Quick responses to changes in a manufacturing system are much more challenging than the responses that we have come to expect in other aspects of our lives. Manufacturing revolves around heavy capital investments to rapidly produce large amounts of product in anticipation of steady streams of commerce. Changes under these conditions not only disrupt the operations, slowing the production of goods, but also create difficulties with managing the capital investments. These are challenges manufacturers face daily. A large part of these challenges is understanding how best to refit manufacturing facilities to respond to variability, and how to plan new production facilities. By analyzing the information that is available in a manufacturing system, manufacturers can make more informed decisions as to how to respond to change. Advances in the technological infrastructure underlying manufacturing systems are enabling more reliable and timely flow of information across all levels of the manufacturing operation. We propose that effective utilization of such operational information will enable more automated, agile responses to the changing conditions, i.e. Smart Manufacturing. In this paper, we analyze the sources and the standards supporting the flow of that information throughout the enterprise. The analysis is based an intersection of two reference models: the Factory Design and Improvement (FDI) process and the ISA88 hierarchical model of manufacturing operations. The FDI process consists of a set of high-level activities for designing and improving manufacturing operations. The ISA88 hierarchical model specifies seven levels of control within a manufacturing enterprise.
Manufacturing standards provide the means for industries to effectively and consistently deploy m... more Manufacturing standards provide the means for industries to effectively and consistently deploy methodologies and technologies to assess their performance. These assessments set the stage for controlling manufacturing systems and processes and enabling continuous improvement within the enterprise. Several evolving manufacturing-related standards impact the manufacturing simulation community and software vendors. This panel explores standards that enable modeling and simulation to play a larger role in manufacturing enterprises through tighter integration of simulation with manufacturing operations.
Many integration projects today rely on shared semantic models based on standards represented usi... more Many integration projects today rely on shared semantic models based on standards represented using Extensible Mark up Language (XML) technologies. Shared semantic models typically evolve and require maintenance. In addition, to promote interoperability and reduce integration costs, the shared semantics should be reused as much as possible. The GSA Component Organization and Registration Environment (CORE.GOV) initiative is an effort to promote the sharing and reuse of components to reduce the acquisition costs of software needed by government. To be effective, CORE.GOV components must be consistent and valid in terms of agreed upon standards and guidelines. In this paper, we describe an activity model for validation of shared semantic models that is coherent and supports efficient enterprise integration. We then use this activity model to frame our research and the development of tools to support those activities. Overviews of these supporting tools are described primarily in the context of the W3C XML Schema. At the present, we focus our work on the W3C XML Schema as the representation of choice, due to its extensive adoption by industry. We believe this validation model and associated tools could serve as the basis for a CORE.GOV validation and acceptance process.
The design of manufacturing systems can see dramatic improvements through the use of digital tech... more The design of manufacturing systems can see dramatic improvements through the use of digital technologies for modeling and simulation prior to deployment. At the 2017 ASME International Manufacturing Science and Engineering Conference held jointly with the 45th SME North American Manufacturing Research Conference, researchers met within a workshop to discuss structuring and presenting research for modeling manufacturing processes to support life cycle assessment. Workshop participants explored a vision for using standard formats to represent manufacturing processes in a community-based repository and identified research opportunities and challenges. This paper places these resulting research directions into a plan for implementing the vision. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME).
The need to share complex product data across multiple enterprises, using different computing sys... more The need to share complex product data across multiple enterprises, using different computing systems and networks is growing. The ISO Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data (STEP) addresses this need by providing information models which clearly and unambiguously describe this data for different enterprise applications. The validity of these information models is essential for success in sharing data in a highly automated business environment. This document describes requirements for software to support the testing of information models for validity and correcmess. The requirements provide a basis for the software development to support the Validation Testing System (VTS) within the National PDES Testbed, This document describes the software needs as currently known for a complete validation testing system. It identifies the scope of the VTS software, presents functional requirements for the proposed system, describes the data flow, environment, external interfaces, performance, and documentation requirements of the system, and prioritizes the requirements for the purpose of implementing the proposed system. Certain trade names and company products are mentioned in this document in order to adequately sp^ify the software and equipment to be used. In no case does such identification imply recommendation or endorsement by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The work described is funded by the United States Government and is not subject to copyright NIST-114A
Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering, 2019
Recent efforts in smart manufacturing (SM) have proven quite effective at elucidating system beha... more Recent efforts in smart manufacturing (SM) have proven quite effective at elucidating system behavior using sensing systems, communications, and computational platforms, along with statistical methods to collect and analyze the real-time performance data. However, how do you effectively select where and when to implement these technology solutions within manufacturing operations? Furthermore, how do you account for the human-driven activities in manufacturing when inserting new technologies? Due to a reliance on human problem-solving skills, today’s maintenance operations are largely manual processes without wide-spread automation. The current state-of-the-art maintenance management systems and out-of-the-box solutions do not directly provide necessary synergy between human and technology, and many paradigms ultimately keep the human and digital knowledge systems separate. Decision makers are using one or the other on a case-by-case basis, causing both human and machine to cannibali...
Today's manufacturers face ever-increasing demands of variability-greater customization, smaller ... more Today's manufacturers face ever-increasing demands of variability-greater customization, smaller lot sizes, sudden supply-chain changes and disruptions. Successful manufacturers will have to choose and incorporate technologies that help them quickly adapt to rapid change and to elevate product quality while optimizing use of energy and resources. These technologies form the core of an emerging, information-centric, Smart Manufacturing System that maximizes the flow and re-use of data throughout the enterprise. The ability of disparate systems, however, to exchange, understand, and exploit product, production, and business data rests critically on information standards. This report provides a review of the body of pertinent standards-a standards landscape-upon which future smart manufacturing systems will rely. This landscape comprises integration standards within and across three manufacturing lifecycle dimensions: product, production system, and business. We discuss opportunities and challenges for new standards, and present emerging activities addressing these opportunities. This report will allow manufacturing practitioners to better understand those standards useful to integration of smart manufacturing technologies. Disclaimer Certain commercial systems are identified in this paper. Such identification does not imply recommendation or endorsement by NIST; nor does it imply that the products identified are necessarily the best available for the purpose. Further, any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NIST or any other supporting U.S. government or corporate organizations.
The NDRProfile schema provides a common syntax for exchanging, managing, and reusing XML Schema n... more The NDRProfile schema provides a common syntax for exchanging, managing, and reusing XML Schema naming and design rules (NDRs). NDRProfile, used by NIST's Quality of Design (QOD) application as a format for import and export of rule sets, is also useful for general exchange of NDRs and, with accompanying stylesheets and other materials, provides an environment for authoring and formatting NDR documentation. This paper describes the content of the NDRProfile schema and its various uses. Disclaimer Mention of commercial products or services in this document does not imply approval or endorsement by NIST, nor does it imply that such products or services are necessarily the best available for the purpose.
Global population growth and increasing resource scarcity are necessitating sustainable manufactu... more Global population growth and increasing resource scarcity are necessitating sustainable manufacturing and circular economy (CE) practices. These practices require the decisions made at each product life cycle (PLC) stage consider sustainability and circularity implications. We propose PLC system level optimization to identify the most favorable choices, instead of siloed individual PLC stage-specific optimizations. This should yield better circularity by permitting manufacturers to take a more holistic view and identify the areas of highest impact across the PLC. This paper presents initial work towards building a PLC system optimization framework. From an initial review of current circularity metrics, we identify metrics that are suitable for forming the optimization objectives. Second, we identify decision variables available to manufacturers across the PLC that are useful in optimizing the entire system's circularity and sustainability. Finally, we identify limitations of current metrics, and discuss major challenges and potential solutions to PLC system optimization problems.
The bottom up demand from consumers for more sustainable products, and the top down need to compl... more The bottom up demand from consumers for more sustainable products, and the top down need to comply with government regulations motivates manufacturers to adopt tools and methods to evaluate their operations for opportunities to reduce environmental impact and improve competitiveness. Manufacturers have actively improved the sustainability of their products through the use of such tools and methods. However recently, manufacturers are struggling to maintain the necessary gains in energy and material efficiency due to the assessment inaccuracies of current ad hoc methods and their inability to identify large sustainability improvement opportunities. Overcoming this barrier requires standardized methods and tools that are implementable and which contain accurate manufacturing process-level information. To aid in developing such methods and tools, this study contrasts the perspective of industry and academic research on the topics of sustainable manufacturing metrics and measurements, and process modeling to determine the deficits that exist in enacting academic theory to practice. Furthermore, this study highlights some of the industry responses to the development of related standards for sustainability assessment. Compare findings Industry Perspective Roundtable 1 (N=10) Roundtable 2 (N=10) Roundtable 3 (N=11) Report barriers and recommendations Literature Perspective Measuring Performance Metric Selection Methods & Tools Focus Topics Process Modeling Metrics and Measurements Literature Review Group Discussions
This report describes installation and use of the XML Schema [1] Quality of Design Standalone tes... more This report describes installation and use of the XML Schema [1] Quality of Design Standalone testing system, or QOD Standalone. QOD Standalone is one of several tools produced by NIST's XML Testbed project within the Manufacturing Systems Integration Division at NIST. These tools aid in producing high quality XML schemas using a standards-based approach to manufacturing systems integration. QOD may be used by an XML schema developer to ensure compliance with a set of guidelines for XML schema development, a.k.a. Naming and Design Rules (NDR). QOD Standalone, derived from the original web-based system, may be used for off-line testing, hence the name "Standalone." While the tool is configurable to use NDR from any number of original sources, it is distributed with tests of NDR from the Open Applications Group (OAG) [2] and Department of the Navy (DON) [3]. Tests for other NDR may be loaded into the system as they are available.
Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Sep 1, 2016
Smart manufacturing is defined by high degrees of automation. Automation, in turn, is defined by ... more Smart manufacturing is defined by high degrees of automation. Automation, in turn, is defined by clearly defined processes. The use of standards in this environment is not just commonplace, but essential to creating repeatable processes and reliable systems. As with the rest of society, manufacturing systems are becoming more tightly connected through advances in information and communication technologies (ICT). As a result, manufacturers are able to receive information from their business partners and operational units much more quickly and are expected to respond quickly as well. Quick responses to changes in a manufacturing system are much more challenging than the responses that we have come to expect in other aspects of our lives. Manufacturing revolves around heavy capital investments to rapidly produce large amounts of product in anticipation of steady streams of commerce. Changes under these conditions not only disrupt the operations, slowing the production of goods, but also create difficulties with managing the capital investments. These are challenges manufacturers face daily. A large part of these challenges is understanding how best to refit manufacturing facilities to respond to variability, and how to plan new production facilities. By analyzing the information that is available in a manufacturing system, manufacturers can make more informed decisions as to how to respond to change. Advances in the technological infrastructure underlying manufacturing systems are enabling more reliable and timely flow of information across all levels of the manufacturing operation. We propose that effective utilization of such operational information will enable more automated, agile responses to the changing conditions, i.e. Smart Manufacturing. In this paper, we analyze the sources and the standards supporting the flow of that information throughout the enterprise. The analysis is based an intersection of two reference models: the Factory Design and Improvement (FDI) process and the ISA88 hierarchical model of manufacturing operations. The FDI process consists of a set of high-level activities for designing and improving manufacturing operations. The ISA88 hierarchical model specifies seven levels of control within a manufacturing enterprise.
Manufacturing standards provide the means for industries to effectively and consistently deploy m... more Manufacturing standards provide the means for industries to effectively and consistently deploy methodologies and technologies to assess their performance. These assessments set the stage for controlling manufacturing systems and processes and enabling continuous improvement within the enterprise. Several evolving manufacturing-related standards impact the manufacturing simulation community and software vendors. This panel explores standards that enable modeling and simulation to play a larger role in manufacturing enterprises through tighter integration of simulation with manufacturing operations.
Many integration projects today rely on shared semantic models based on standards represented usi... more Many integration projects today rely on shared semantic models based on standards represented using Extensible Mark up Language (XML) technologies. Shared semantic models typically evolve and require maintenance. In addition, to promote interoperability and reduce integration costs, the shared semantics should be reused as much as possible. The GSA Component Organization and Registration Environment (CORE.GOV) initiative is an effort to promote the sharing and reuse of components to reduce the acquisition costs of software needed by government. To be effective, CORE.GOV components must be consistent and valid in terms of agreed upon standards and guidelines. In this paper, we describe an activity model for validation of shared semantic models that is coherent and supports efficient enterprise integration. We then use this activity model to frame our research and the development of tools to support those activities. Overviews of these supporting tools are described primarily in the context of the W3C XML Schema. At the present, we focus our work on the W3C XML Schema as the representation of choice, due to its extensive adoption by industry. We believe this validation model and associated tools could serve as the basis for a CORE.GOV validation and acceptance process.
The design of manufacturing systems can see dramatic improvements through the use of digital tech... more The design of manufacturing systems can see dramatic improvements through the use of digital technologies for modeling and simulation prior to deployment. At the 2017 ASME International Manufacturing Science and Engineering Conference held jointly with the 45th SME North American Manufacturing Research Conference, researchers met within a workshop to discuss structuring and presenting research for modeling manufacturing processes to support life cycle assessment. Workshop participants explored a vision for using standard formats to represent manufacturing processes in a community-based repository and identified research opportunities and challenges. This paper places these resulting research directions into a plan for implementing the vision. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME).
The need to share complex product data across multiple enterprises, using different computing sys... more The need to share complex product data across multiple enterprises, using different computing systems and networks is growing. The ISO Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data (STEP) addresses this need by providing information models which clearly and unambiguously describe this data for different enterprise applications. The validity of these information models is essential for success in sharing data in a highly automated business environment. This document describes requirements for software to support the testing of information models for validity and correcmess. The requirements provide a basis for the software development to support the Validation Testing System (VTS) within the National PDES Testbed, This document describes the software needs as currently known for a complete validation testing system. It identifies the scope of the VTS software, presents functional requirements for the proposed system, describes the data flow, environment, external interfaces, performance, and documentation requirements of the system, and prioritizes the requirements for the purpose of implementing the proposed system. Certain trade names and company products are mentioned in this document in order to adequately sp^ify the software and equipment to be used. In no case does such identification imply recommendation or endorsement by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The work described is funded by the United States Government and is not subject to copyright NIST-114A
Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering, 2019
Recent efforts in smart manufacturing (SM) have proven quite effective at elucidating system beha... more Recent efforts in smart manufacturing (SM) have proven quite effective at elucidating system behavior using sensing systems, communications, and computational platforms, along with statistical methods to collect and analyze the real-time performance data. However, how do you effectively select where and when to implement these technology solutions within manufacturing operations? Furthermore, how do you account for the human-driven activities in manufacturing when inserting new technologies? Due to a reliance on human problem-solving skills, today’s maintenance operations are largely manual processes without wide-spread automation. The current state-of-the-art maintenance management systems and out-of-the-box solutions do not directly provide necessary synergy between human and technology, and many paradigms ultimately keep the human and digital knowledge systems separate. Decision makers are using one or the other on a case-by-case basis, causing both human and machine to cannibali...
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