MTConnect Roadmap Strategy to Promote Advanced Manufacturing in the United States

Goal: Develop a strategy and roadmap to identify current barriers to full adoption of MTConnect, an evolving interoperability standard for manufacturing, and determine the best path forward to achieve widespread implementation across manufacturing industries.

Lead: National Center for Defense Manufacturing & Machining (NCDMM)
486 Cornell Rd.
Blairsville, PA 15717

Award Number: 70NANB14H044

Federal Funding: $434,577

Project Duration: 10 months

First released in late 2008, MTConnect is an open, royalty-free standard intended to foster greater interoperability between manufacturing devices and software applications. It is a basic first step in linking shop floor technologies and advancing toward the goal of seamless manufacturing operations. To date, implementations and enhancements of the standard have focused on interfaces to machine tools. However, MTConnect has the potential to develop into a standard of far greater utility and value for the entire discrete parts manufacturing industry.

Led by NCDMM, this project will develop a strategy and roadmap to guide enhancements of the open standard so that it can enable capture of data to enable manufacturing intelligence and enterprise productivity across the discrete parts manufacturing sector. Goals include:

• Determine needs of various industries and identify those that would benefit most from MTConnect enhancements.
• Understand barriers to full adoption of the standard.
• Identify additional technologies and devices that the standard should address.
• Develop a strategic roadmap to guide MTConnect enhancements so that it becomes the industry standard for manufacturing equipment and device communication.

For project information: Jim Fisher, (724) 539-6133, scott.deutsch [at] ncdmm.org (jim[dot]fisher[at]ncdmm[dot]org)

Funded Participants:

• CJ Hill Consulting Services (Melbourne, FL)
• Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA)
• MAYA Design (Pittsburgh, PA)
• MTConnect Institute thru the Association for Manufacturing Technology (McLean, VA)

AMTech Project Manager: Jean-Louis Staudenmann, (301) 975-4866, jean-louis.staudenmann [at] nist.gov (jean-louis[dot]staudenmann[at]nist[dot]gov)