A Virtual Organization to Coordinate a National R&D Agenda in Smart, Zero-Incident, Zero-Emission Manufacturing

Cache Corporation, Williamsburg MA

Investigators

Abstract

Public Abstract 0742764 James Davis CACHE Corporation A Virtual Organization to Coordinate a National R&D Agenda in Smart, Zero-Incident, Zero-Emission Manufacturing Intellectual Merit. To facilitate the coordinated development of smart, zero-incident, zero-emission manufacturing, an Engineering Virtual Organization (EVO) will be established with a core group of engineers from industry, academia, and government, along with cyberinfrastructure (CI) practitioners from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Launch of the EVO will involve the process systems engineering community at large; the FIATECH industry consortium, with 65 companies and universities; the ASM (Abnormal Situation Management) consortium, comprised of 14 companies and universities; and the CACHE (Computer Aids in Chemical Engineering) corporation, which includes 21 university and seven industry trustees, along with 150 member chemical engineering departments worldwide. SDSC and TACC, as TeraGrid sites, will identify relevant grid and, in particular, TeraGrid resources; help develop the CI requirements for smart manufacturing; and support a gateway through which the EVO will operate and do its work. Working as a virtual organization, this community will pursue a common objective of initiating and sustaining the development of a coordinated national research and development agenda and technical "roadmap" for smart, zero-incident, zero-emission manufacturing. The process for establishing this roadmap will build on the successful model of FIATECH, one of the EVO's contributing partners. By defining the end vision and constructing the roadmap, research and development activities to close the gaps between the future and current states can be identified. Broader Impacts. The focused objective of this EVO builds on an NSF-sponsored workshop, "Cyberinfrastructure (CI) in Chemical and Biological Process Systems: Impact and Directions," held Sept. 25-26, 2006, where industry and academic experts collectively identified smart manufacturing as a grand-challenge problem of national importance. With an unusually strong collaboration between academia and key industry groups, this EVO is designed to build the critical-mass consensus that will spur additional future government and industry funding for the coordinated national agendas needed to address this national grand-challenge problem.