EAGER/Cybermanufacturing: Smart Manufacturing Platform for Tissue Engineering

器官衰竭和组织损伤是主要的健康问题。由于供体器官的短缺，目前的器官移植治疗是不够的，导致等待时间长。一种有希望的替代方案是组织工程，它寻求创造功能组织，以使用生物材料替代品(支架)来取代或修复受损组织。支架具有严格的设计要求，如三维(3D)内部多孔结构、患者特定的几何形状以及适当的材料和机械性能，以促进功能活组织的生长。目前的支架制造方法通常采用试错法，这种方法没有考虑设计、材料和工艺之间的综合相互作用，导致支架具有不可预测的性能。这个早期概念探索研究奖助金项目的目标是开发一个智能系统来指导形状、材料和工艺参数的优化，从而产生一个设计和制造3D脚手架的智能决策矩阵。该项目的目标是研究一种基于面向服务的体系结构(SOA)的集成技术和社交网络平台，使产品(3D多孔支架)、工艺(熔融沉积建模-FDM)和材料(热塑性聚己内酯-PCL)等领域能够有效地进行人与人之间的协作和沟通。在语义网技术和社交网络分析的支持下，这个智能平台嵌入了设计和制造解决方案的智能配置能力，从而促进了信息和知识的重用，降低了成本。虽然这项工作的重点是使用熔融工艺的多孔PCL支架，但这个知识驱动的智能平台可以扩展到其他生物制造方法。

Organ failure and tissue damage are major health problems. The current therapy of organ transplantation is inadequate because of the shortage of available donor organs, resulting in long waiting times. A promising alternative is tissue engineering, which seeks to create functional tissues to replace or repair damaged tissues using biomaterial-substitutes (scaffolds). Scaffolds have stringent design requirements, such a three-dimensional (3D) internal-porous structure, patient-specific geometry, and appropriate materials and mechanical properties to encourage the growth of functional living tissues. Current scaffold manufacturing methods typically adopt a trial-and-error approach, which does not consider comprehensive interactions among design, material and process and results in scaffolds with unpredictable properties. The goal of this EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project is to develop an intelligent system to guide the optimization of shape, materials and process parameters, resulting in a smart decision matrix for designing and manufacturing 3D scaffolds. The objective of this project is to research an SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) based integrated technical and social networking platform that enables effective human-human collaboration and communication among the domains of product (3D porous scaffold), process (Fused Deposition Modelling-FDM) and material (thermoplastic polycaprolactone-PCL). This smart platform, enabled by semantic web technology and social network analysis, embeds the capability of intelligent configurations of design and manufacturing solutions; therefore promoting information and knowledge reuse and cost reduction. Although the focus of this work is on porous PCL scaffolds using the FDM process, the knowledge-driven, smart platform can be extended to other biomanufacturing methods.