Intelligent Manufacturing € March € 1996 € Vol. 2 € No. 3

MESA Begins Work on SMART Project

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Intelligent agents will be one of the tools used to design a new framework for manufacturing execution system (MES) software. The Manufacturing Execution Systems Association (MESA International) (Pittsburgh, Pa.), as a member of the National Industrial Information Infrastructure Protocols (NIIIP) Consortium, will receive $13 million in national funding for the development of solutions for MES-Adaptable Replicable Technology (SMART) from the Advanced Technology Program of the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The SMART project will receive this cost-shared funding to work on experimental, highly flexible technologies to simplify the task of integrating and sharing real-time data across the many different planning, tracking and control systems employed by the nation's manufacturing industries. Members of the NIIIP Consortium include General Motors Corp. North American Operations, IBM, International TechneGroup, MESA International, STEP Tools, UES and the University of Florida.

Among MESA's membership, several companies are participating, including: Applied Automation Techniques, Consilium, FACT, FAST, ICC and MDSS (with CAMSTAR serving as an alternate). Each member is to assign one full-time staff member to the project. These six individuals will form a subcommittee that, along with an outside project coordinator, will liaison with other members of the consortium. For its part, MESA Will receive approximately $1.5 million over the next three years.

The Advanced Technology Program (ATP) provides cost-shared funding to industry for high-risk research and development projects, with the potential to spark broad-based economic benefits for the U.S. The ATP does not fund product development; rather, it accelerates, and in many cases enables, potentially important research and development projects that industry otherwise would not undertake, or would not devote significant resources to because of the technical risks involved. ATP awards are made on the basis of a rigorous competitive review considering the scientific and technical merit of each and its potential benefits for the U.S. economy.

The need for SMART was alluded to in ATP's announcement of the project's funding: "While manufacturing execution systems provide manufacturers with critical functionality, the technology to integrate these applications with each other and throughout the enterprise is conspicuously absent, placing robust manufacturing automation solutions out of reach for 90% of the country's manufacturing sites."

The NIIIP Consortium will develop an overarching system of algorithms, models, interfaces, decision support tools and relevant practices under which a wide variety of automated manufacturing environments can work together.

The proposed SMART will be an open, non-proprietary software framework developed to facilitate the horizontal (among MES solutions) and vertical (from planning to operations) integration of existing and future factory information systems. To make the factory better able to adapt to specialized and varied orders, decision support tools and intelligent software agents that can collect relevant data will be developed.

The use of intelligent agent technology in the implementation of the SMART framework will allow it to grow and evolve intelligently over time and adapt to additional end user environments. These agents are software protocols that perform trial-and-error searching procedures by navigating through computer networks, such as the Internet, to perform tasks for their users.

The technologies that will result from the SMART project will be designed to support the complexity and disparity of the entire gamut of manufacturing enterprises.

MESA International is an industry software trade association of 28 member companies who provide MES, point solutions, hardware platforms, databases, systems integration services, data collection technology, controls, and consulting services.