Manufacturing Interoperability Program

Program Goal -- To equip U.S. manufacturers with the technical guidance and testing support needed to interoperate in today’s global, heterogeneous manufacturing world.

Program Manager --  Dr. Steven R. Ray

Technical Approach -- NIST’s Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory aims to equip today’s manufacturer with the guidance and testing support needed to participate in the global, distributed manufacturing world. We work with industrial partners to overcome the information-handling barriers that have arisen from the increased reliance on electronic information exchange with distant customers and suppliers, using a virtual manufacturing environment where vendors and manufacturers can test conformance to existing standards, and researchers can validate the next generation of standards. A picture of our vision is shown in the following Figure.

Program Thrusts -- The Interoperability Program focuses on three major thrusts:

A.     An interoperability testing and demonstration infrastructure

B.     Testing of key integration standards for today’s manufacturers

C.     Development of semantic technologies for tomorrow’s integration needs

These three thrusts depend on one another to be successful. Integration standards will be identified in concert with industrial partners for key information supporting product, process, operations and supply chains. Pragmatic choices will be made to provide a recommended suite of standards for today’s modern manufacturer.

These standards will be supported through the interoperability testing and demonstration infrastructure containing two major components: a testing environment for logging, diagnosis, conformance and interoperability testing focused at the content level, plus a piloting and demonstration environment populated with commercial production software tools to establish the usability of these standards-based approaches in realistic settings. These two components are called the Interoperability Test Bed, and the Virtual Manufacturing Environment, respectively.

Finally, the program is investing in a strong research thrust to support the use of semantic technologies in new standards. It is becoming widely accepted that semantic technology is the correct way to transmit information in an unambiguous and computable fashion, and we are recognized leaders in this arena. The tools within our testing infrastructure will rely upon the semantic research results, and the content-oriented tests will typically use ontologies, either explicitly specified in the standards (most desirable), or reverse-engineered from the standards.