Smart Manufacturing and Construction Systems Program

The objective of the Smart Manufacturing and Construction Control Systems Program is to develop and deploy advances in measurement science for sensing, modeling, and optimizing manufacturing activities in a smart factory.

Optimization is a key performance objective to increase manufacturing productivity and improve product quality. To move beyond slow and costly trial-and-error methods requires making actual production measurements, analyzing the results according to models and simulations, determining actions that improve key performance indicators, and feeding these improvements back upstream for re-planning or re-design. This Program provides the measurement science and standards that enable rapid reconfiguration, control, monitoring, and performance optimization of manufacturing activities within a smart factory. The work focuses on providing the technical basis for the definition and use of measurements, models and architectures, leading to standards that help manufacturers responsively produce best-in-class products with dramatically improved productivity, while maintaining high quality, safety, and security.

The Program addresses EL’s mission to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by anticipating and meeting measurement science and standards needs for technology-intensive manufacturing, through the Program’s technical contributions that underpin standards for optimizing smart manufacturing systems on the shop floor. Applying core competencies in intelligent sensing, modeling and optimization, with staff expertise in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and computer science, the Program will develop the measurement science that informs standards for optimization-related information and performance. The work complements research done by industry and academia through the Program’s focus on measurement needs that cut broadly across the discrete part production, continuous process and batch manufacturing sectors. NIST’s recognized objective neutrality and longer-term dedication to the standards process are also essential to our role in this program.

Some recent accomplishments in smart manufacturing and construction control systems include:

• NIST-developed EtherNet/IP Test Tool  is now used by the Open DeviceNet Vendors Association (ODVA) in performance testing for the EtherNet/IP, Ethernet Industrial Protocol.
• ANSI/ISA-99.01.01 and ANSI/ISA-99.02.01, Industrial Automation and Control Systems Security, published internationally as IEC 6244311 and IEC 6244321, and associated NIST SP 800-82 for Industrial Control Cybersecurity, downloaded over one million times since publication in 2007.
• I++ DME 1.7, Inspection for Dimensional Measurement Equipment, implemented by the majority of coordinate measurement machine (CMM) software and equipment vendors worldwide, and used by many U.S. manufacturers such as Caterpillar, John Deere, Lockheed Martin, Pratt & Whitney and General Electric.
• NIST conducted validation testing and performance measurement for MTConnect Version 1.2; a standard, published by the Association for Manufacturing Technology which defines a protocol and information model for acquiring real-time information from production equipment.
• NIST completed extensive, pre-publication validation testing of pilot projects for ISO 10303 Application Protocol 238.