Background And Achievements
The Model-Based Enterprise (MBE) program aims to answer how a manufacturer can match product needs to process capabilities to determine the best assets and ways to produce products to support U.S. industry’s competitiveness and address industry’s need for interoperability across decentralized systems. Replacing a manufacturing system completely is costly. Thus, manufacturers need the ability to manage the development, re-development, and deployment of new sub-systems in the immediate presence of existing (legacy) applications and systems. The MBE program will address the industrial need by researching the coupling of existing technologies with integrations of system, service, product, process, and logistics models, to enable advanced variant configuration — allowing Industry to be agile and flexible enough to manufacture closer to the end user, in varying lot sizes, with better first-time yields.
Challenges For AR
As part of the MBE program, Dr. Bill Bernstein is leading the Product Lifecycle Data Exploration and Visualization Project. The Project’s goal is to develop and deploy advances in methods, standards, and software tools for data visualization and exploration for improving the efficiency and agility of smart manufacturing systems. One of the key areas of focus is understanding NIST’s role in the standards development process of AR for smart manufacturing
Why AR
Interest in AR for manufacturers continues to grow across US industry. To promote the ease of integration and return on investment of new AR technologies, NIST would like to engage manufacturers and understand the key standards needed in this space.