Emerging Nexis of Cyber, Modeling, and Estimation in Advanced Manufacturing

This article describes opportunities for exploiting cyber, modeling, and estimation technical areas for advanced manufacturing in small lots. In particular, Cyber Enabled Manufacturing Systems (CeMs) for small lot manufacturing that incorporates a model of the process directly into the control algorithm are presented and discussed. The model enables the manufacturing monitoring and control algorithm to accommodate changing conditions without extensive additional experiments. One of the manufacturing processes currently being studied with this methodology is Vacuum Arc Remelting (VAR). Similar to Additive Manufacturing, VAR is a small lot, high-value manufacturing process. There is great opportunity for the control community to have a major impact on advanced manufacturing. This includes increasing the performance of mature manufacturing processes such as VAR or developing the critical control of emerging manufacturing processes like 3D printing. This opportunity is especially timely because of a nexus of multi-physics simulation software, modern estimation methods, and real-time computer architecture and hardware.