Workshop on Open Questions Towards The Success of INDUSTRY 4.0; Prague, Czech Republic; June 17-19, 2020

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports a workshop on open questions towards the success of Industry 4.0, to be held in Prague, Czech Republic on June 17-19, 2020. The three-day workshop will bring together key thought leaders from industry, academia and government from the USA, Germany, and the Czech and Slovak Republics to identify both open problems with and opportunities to advance the program of Industry 4.0. In particular, the workshop will concentrate on defining the requirements for creating an open source of parts and components that are widely produced and used in a variety of industries. This is in realization of the fact that new AI techniques cannot be broadly applied in the manufacturing environment unless an efficient data repository and the associated abstractions of the component models and their compositions are created. Formal models representing the capabilities of various manufacturing machines and processes will enable manufacturers to match design models with manufacturing processes and to automatically update essential characteristics of design models from 'as designed' to 'as manufactured,' thereby improving the effectiveness of both product design and manufacturing by enabling a fully integrated treatment of design and manufacturing. This allows manufacturing considerations to be brought forward into the design process by characterizing designs from the point of view of manufacturability. The framework that the realization of this possibility requires can only be achieved through the collaborative efforts of researchers in manufacturing, computer science and engineering, and artificial intelligence. The workshop will bring such experts together to discuss: (1) formalisms for part representation, (2) methods for search, optimization, logistics and planning, and (3) model selection and data access. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.