I-Corps: The Operating System for Cyber Manufacturing

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project accrues from the cloud manufacturing capabilities of increasing sophistication that it enables. These capabilities range from platforms to improve user access to manufacturing resources to enterprise visibility platforms, supply network management systems, and cloud technology-driven manufacturing marketplaces/exchanges. This project fosters local innovation by enabling networks of easily accessible maker labs and other manufacturing resources. The project can also potentially provide economic development agencies a tool for assessing local manufacturing capability and capacity as well as measuring manufacturing activity through analysis of the in-flow and out-flow of transactions in the system.This I-Corps project creates a cloud platform to provide manufacturing resources with a secure network presence. The project implements a kernel based on a resource-transaction model for manufacturing resources, and surrounds it with services to enable several features, including: a) Network visibility of its capabilities, availability, configuration and state; b) Transaction services, including queue management, calendar, scheduler and transaction processing for initiating and executing jobs; c) User services for authenticating users and managing access and privileges on resources; d) IoT services for gathering and manipulating data streams originating at a resource, and secure distribution to authenticated end-points; e) Connectivity to a curated store of cloud software applications for enhancing its visibility and usability to broad classes of users. With these services and its use of well-established shop-floor connectivity protocols, this platform simplifies the complex tasks of creating and managing cyber-physical manufacturing networks of interacting manufacturing resources or internal/external manufacturing clouds.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.