CESMII Releases Two Waves of Smart Manufacturing Roadmap Project Solicitations

LOS ANGELES, CALIF.— CESMII, the Smart Manufacturing Institute, is pleased to announce two requests for proposals (RFPs) for institute roadmap projects. These RFPs are the final two waves of CESMII’s second round of project requests launched in mid-2019.

• The areas of interest for these RFP waves will focus on:
  improving the core capabilities and addressing gaps in the CESMII Smart Manufacturing Innovation Platform (Wave 3) and
• launching a new category of projects, called innovation projects, to create solutions to manufacturing problems through the use of CESMII technologies (Wave 4).

The SM Innovation Platform (SMIP) is an environment that allows individual operational technology (OT) functional components to be able to interoperate, and for data to be orchestrated between these components. At the heart of SMIP are SM Profiles, an innovative way of providing the ability to move
“data-in-context” from source to consumption, and between components that consume the data to provide a solution. The SMIP also includes the SM Marketplace from where OT applications and SM Profiles can be configured for developing solutions to manufacturing use cases.

Innovation Projects are designed to rapidly develop solutions to solve challenging manufacturing use cases for processes and equipment relevant for CESMII’s membership. Projects must bring value rapidly (approximately three to six months) and will be executed in an agile manner by an interdisciplinary team ideally led by a manufacturer.

The project team will collaborate and develop a solution that includes information models (SM Profiles) and applications necessary to solve the use case.

“CESMII’s Smart Manufacturing Innovation Platform (SMIP) is one of the key pillars of the institute’s strategy of democratizing smart manufacturing," CESMII CTO Haresh Malkani said in prepared remarks. "We have made significant progress in demonstrating some of its core capabilities in recent
months. With these RFPs, we are expecting to take significant strides in growing the platform’s capabilities and engaging our vast ecosystem in building out our marketplace with tools and applications that can solve manufacturing use cases.”

A total of $3.5 million in U.S. funding is being made available through these RFPs. Wave 3 is making about $1 million available for about eight new projects, and Wave 4 is making $2.5 million available for as many as 25 projects.

Applicants will need to provide matching funds to bring the total project value for both Waves to $7 million.