EAGER/Cybermanufacturing: CYMAN: A CYber MANufacturing and Entrepreneurship Initiative to Foster Global Manufacturing

Oklahoma State University, Stillwater OK

Investigators

Abstract

Cyber manufacturing refers to the use of the Internet and other software technologies to accomplish collaborative manufacturing from different locations among various organizations with different areas of expertise. This EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project deals with creation of cyber manufacturing approaches and practices involving students in the US and international universities; these students will form teams, collaborate and suggest/develop new ideas for two categories of products: (i) physical parts or products which can be produced by 3D printing, and (ii) "apps" for smart phones and tablets which enable cyber manufacturing collaborations. The overall goal is to encourage engineering students to become cyber entrepreneurs in manufacturing and related software fields; successful ideas for physical products and software apps will be commercialized. Assistance will be provided to students to create new enterprises or startups. The project involves multiple disciplines and targets both undergraduate and graduate students in various engineering fields and computer science. The teaming activities will be accomplished in the context of engineering courses which will also introduce students to emerging practices and technologies and prepare them to become leaders in our IT intensive world. A collaboration community of interdisciplinary engineering students will be established who will interact through a Cyber-Manufacturing Test Bed which will take advantage of the current Internet and the Next Internet which is evolving. The Cyber-Manufacturing Test Bed will provide the foundation to create and support apps where such cyber collaborations will take place. The adoption of Open/shared, extensible architectures will enable potential distributed partners to discover and respond to opportunities in an agile manner. Technologies ranging from existing cloud based networks to emerging Next Generation GENI based smart networks will be explored to support this cyber community. The computing infrastructure will emphasize providing "on-demand" access to the collaborative software resources, where remote access protocols and simulation platforms play a vital role. With emerging software-defined computing (SDN) and networking solutions, it will be possible to deploy end-to-end information exchange services between various manufacturing enterprises (including small businesses), without the support of large network vendors and service providers. Thin-client methods will be adopted to access the cyber tools (in manufacturing, design, simulation, etc.) to ensure secure management of data intensive operations.