The digital manufacturing age – with physical and digital convergence – has caught the attention of industry in the United States, according to industrial conglomerate GE.
Writing on the GE Ideas Laboratory website, the company’s Christine Furstoss, Technical Director of Manufacturing, Chemistry and Materials Technologies, cited the attention in presentations given to digitisation at major industrial event, The Big M Convergence, held this week in Detroit.
GE itself announced this week that it would lead an initiative to build a Manufacturing Commons open source platform to “connect the digital thread” from project conception to manufacture.
This would represent a …”distributed and federated architecture … that can support entire manufacturing production processes and supply chains.”
Furstoss likened the merging of cyber and physical worlds to manufacturing meeting a multi-player online video game, virtually building, sharing and testing products before they were made.
Further than this, the real benefits for manufacturers would arrive, “when we can take track the entire lifecycle of our products digitally and feed information and learnings back to the production designers and to the virtual manufacturing engineers.”
To read her comments on “A New Mindset For Manufacturing”, click here.
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