Member News: CESMII Releases Two Waves of Smart Manufacturing Roadmap Project Solicitations

CESMII Releases Two Waves of Smart Manufacturing Roadmap Project Solicitations

Project calls target development of core Smart Manufacturing technologies and solutions

LOS ANGELES, CALIF., May 12, 2020 — CESMII - the Smart Manufacturing Institute is pleased to announce two (2) Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for institute roadmap projects. These RFPs are the final two waves of CESMII’s second round of project requests (RFP2) launched in mid-2019. The areas of interest for these RFP waves will focus on:

• improving the core capabilities and addressing gaps in the CESMII Smart Manufacturing Innovation Platform (Wave 3); and,
• launching a new category of projects, called Innovation Projects, to create solutions to manufacturing problems through the use of CESMII technologies (Wave 4).

The SM Innovation Platform (SMIP) is an environment that allows individual operational technology (OT) functional components to be able to interoperate, and for data to be orchestrated between these components. At the heart of SMIP are SM Profiles, an innovative way of providing the ability to move “data-in-context” from source to consumption, and between components that consume the data to provide a solution. The SMIP also includes the SM Marketplace from where OT applications and SM Profiles can be configured for developing solutions to manufacturing use cases.

Innovation Projects are designed to rapidly develop solutions to solve challenging manufacturing use cases for processes and equipment relevant for CESMII’s membership. Projects must bring value rapidly (approximately 3-6 months) and will be executed in an agile manner by an interdisciplinary team ideally led by a manufacturer. The project team will collaborate and develop a solution that includes information models (SM Profiles) and applications necessary to solve the use case.

Commenting on the RFPs, CESMII CTO, Haresh Malkani, said, “CESMII’s Smart Manufacturing Innovation Platform (SMIP) is one of the key pillars of the institute’s strategy of democratizing Smart Manufacturing. We have made significant progress in demonstrating some of its core capabilities in recent months. With these RFPs, we are expecting to take significant strides in growing the platform’s capabilities and engaging our vast ecosystem in building out our marketplace with tools and applications that can solve manufacturing use cases.”

A total of $3.5 in Federal funding is being made available through these RFPs. Wave 3 is making approximately $1 million available for approximately 8 new projects, and Wave 4 is making $2.5 million available for up to 25 projects. Applicants will need to provide matching funds to bring the total project value for both Waves to $7 million.

For more information about these Requests-For-Proposal, please visit CESMII’s website at https://www.cesmii.org/resources

About CESMII

CESMII is the United States’ national institute on Smart Manufacturing, driving cultural and technological transformation and secure industrial technologies as national imperatives. By enabling frictionless movement of information – raw and contextualized data – between real-time Operations and the people and systems that create value in and across Manufacturing organizations, CESMII is ensuring the power of information and innovation is at the fingertips of everyone who touches manufacturing.

The Institute is accelerating Smart Manufacturing (SM) adoption through the integration of advanced sensors, data (ingestion – contextualization – modeling – analytics), platforms and controls to radically impact manufacturing performance, through measurable improvements in areas such as: Quality, throughput, costs/profitability, safety, asset reliability and energy productivity. CESMII’s program and administrative home is with the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing Office.

For more information, visit the CESMII website at: https://www.cesmii.org.