Abstract
Over the last few decades, globalization has weakened the US manufacturing sector. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed import dependencies and supply chain shocks that have raised public and private awareness of the need to rebuild domestic production. A range of new technologies, collectively called Industry 4.0, create opportunities to revolutionize domestic and local manufacturing. Success depends on further refinement of those technologies, broad implementation throughout private companies, and concerted efforts to rebuild the industrial commons, the national ecosystem of producers, suppliers, service providers, educators, and workforce necessary to regain a competitive, innovative manufacturing sector. A recent workshop sponsored by the Engineering Research Visioning Alliance (ERVA) identified a range of challenges and opportunities to build a resilient, flexible, scalable, and high-quality manufacturing sector. This paper provides a strategic roadmap for regaining US manufacturing leadership by briefly summarizing discussions at the ERVA-sponsored workshop held in 2023 and providing additional analysis of key technical and economic issues that must be addressed to achieve dynamic, high-value manufacturing in the USA. The focus of this presentation is on discrete manufacturing of production of structural components, a large subset of total manufacturing that produces high-value inputs and finished products for domestic consumption and export.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 688-702 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Sep 2024 |
Funding
One vision of this future is distributed manufacturing in which smaller factories are located close to markets and multiple production processes and facilities work together intelligently to make larger, complex, high-value components. To consider the types of technologies and required engineering research needed to achieve this vision, the Engineering Research Visioning Alliance (ERVA) [], supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Directorate, held a visioning event on March 30 and 31, 2023. Co-hosted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Tennessee Manufacturing and Design Enterprise (TN MADE), the event convened 56 researchers and technical experts from small- to medium-sized manufacturing companies, academia, government, and industry. The group identified engineering research priorities to address one of the most crucial challenges of the next half-century\u2014developing resilient, flexible, scalable, and high-quality distributed manufacturing systems for discrete products/tools []. Primary support for this project was provided by Engineering Research Visioning Alliance (ERVA), an initiative funded by the National Science Foundation under award number 2048419 and administered by the University Industry Demonstration Partnership (UIDP). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of NSF or UIDP support for this activity is provided by the NSF-Engineering Research Visioning Alliance, ERVA. The authors would also like to acknowledge support from the NSF Engineering Research Center for Hybrid Autonomous Manufacturing Moving from Evolution to Revolution (ERC\u2010HAMMER) under Award Number EEC2133630.
Keywords
- Agile manufacturing
- Artificial intelligence (AI)
- Distributed manufacturing
- Industry 4.0
- Manufacturing-for-design