Bringing Industry 4.0 manufacturing to life: Digital shadows, optimized trajectories, structural controls, and advanced mechatronics

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The 4th Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) aims to establish smart factories with built-in virtualization, monitoring, self-optimization, and control functionalities, to achieve improved manufacturing efficiency and product quality across complete process chains. Each production machine would have a digital simulation model, called a `digital shadow', running in parallel to predict, monitor, characterize, optimize, control, and enhance its performance. The current state of knowledge, however, falls short of being able to achieve such an ambitious set of goals in an effective and industrially viable manner. The proposed Discovery program aims to help close this gap, by developing new technologies in support of certain critical functionalities envisioned in Industry 4.0. These include: dynamic model estimation and simulation from in-process manufacturing data, trajectory optimization, on-the-fly process improvement through advanced real-time controls, and novel mechatronic devices to boost manufacturing productivity. In addition to pursuing deep fundamental research in each of the themes, a holistic and integrative approach is proposed in which the progress and results from every theme will enable far-reaching new ideas to be pursued in the complementary themes. For example, digital shadows will be integrated with trajectory optimization algorithms and with highly efficient 3D solid modeling techniques. Thus, the proposed trajectory optimization will directly consider part quality outcomes as the optimization constraints, rather than the traditionally used kinematic (velocity, acceleration, and jerk) limits of the production machine's moving axes. This direct approach is expected to enable a dramatic reduction in the conservativeness of the generated trajectories, thereby reducing the manufacturing cycle time and enabling the desired part accuracy requirements to be retained. Similar synergies between all theme areas will be actively capitalized upon within this Discovery program, in order to achieve results that are both scientifically new and also industrially innovative and superior. Overall, this Discovery program targets bold and ambitious new steps towards transforming the state of knowledge in virtual and intelligent manufacturing to the next level, while simultaneously training new highly qualified personnel at postdoctoral, PhD, master's, and undergraduate levels. The University of Waterloo's Precision Controls Laboratory, founded by Prof. Erkorkmaz, has a highly successful record of research in mechatronic devices, modeling, identification, trajectory optimization, precision controls, and process simulation. Many core ideas developed through earlier Discovery programs have led to collaborative follow-up R&D projects with small, medium, and large-scale companies within and outside Canada, and have resulted in technologies and solutions that have been transferred to industry, as well as new commercial products in CNC manufacturing.