Brokering Additive Manufacturing
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Bristol
Department Name: Mechanical Engineering
Abstract
Society is driving the need for Responsive Manufacturing and requires fundamental research to come-up with strategies that can complement existing Modern Manufacturing Practice (MPP) (e.g. batch, mass and just-in-time).
Driver 1 is Big Demand, which concerns the response, volume, variety and location in demand, arising from large-scale events, such as COVID-19, Brexit, Disaster Response, Global Financial Crisis and War, and mass-customisation/bespoke products simply cannot be met by MPP, such as automotive production lines and supply chains, as they have been optimised for particular products.
Driver 2 is accommodating dynamic production constraints. COVID-19's measures of social distancing and tiering system as well as trade disputes (Brexit and America vs. China) have shown how quickly MPP can be severed, significantly reducing supply to society.
Driver 3 is facilitating manufacturing independence. MMP has enabled large developed nations - America, China, EU, Japan, South Korea, India - to provide production capability that developed smaller (e.g. UK, Switzerland) and developing nations would not have had access to. However, many society's view manufacturing independence as a strategic goal (e.g. Reshoring) especially in light of Drivers 1 & 2 where a nations reliance on other nations' manufacturing capability leaves them vulnerable and without the capability to combat their national needs.
Brokered Additive Manufacturing (BAM) will prove that these drivers can be met through a nation's highly distributed and diverse Additive Manufacturing (AM) capability if it can be effectively brokered.
BAM brings together world-leading researchers from the Schools of Civil, Mechanical and Aerospace engineering and Business Management, 300+ leaders in the AM industry (GTMA, AMUG, AT 3D Squared) and Model-Based Systems Engineering (CFMS), and industry/government initiatives (Reshoring UK) to create novel brokering of highly distributed and diverse manufacturing systems.
BAM's transdisciplinary approach will see the team:
1. profile Big Demand, dynamic production constraints and local, regional, national and global contexts to facilitate independence.
2. develop Business Models and Government Policy.
3. characterise AM capability.
4. create Production System boundary condition models and agent-based models of BAM that simulate both human and machine brokering of jobs at community, regional, national and international scales.
BAM solutions will be evaluated through controlled lab experiments, living labs and development of industry demonstrators. The solutions will give rise to a new class of production system that broker highly distributed and diverse manufacturing capability (e.g. AM). This will underpin factories of the future that are not confined to single facilities but are as diverse and distributed as the manufacturing capability they house, revolutionising society's production giving it greater flexibility and responsiveness to meet our future needs.
Driver 1 is Big Demand, which concerns the response, volume, variety and location in demand, arising from large-scale events, such as COVID-19, Brexit, Disaster Response, Global Financial Crisis and War, and mass-customisation/bespoke products simply cannot be met by MPP, such as automotive production lines and supply chains, as they have been optimised for particular products.
Driver 2 is accommodating dynamic production constraints. COVID-19's measures of social distancing and tiering system as well as trade disputes (Brexit and America vs. China) have shown how quickly MPP can be severed, significantly reducing supply to society.
Driver 3 is facilitating manufacturing independence. MMP has enabled large developed nations - America, China, EU, Japan, South Korea, India - to provide production capability that developed smaller (e.g. UK, Switzerland) and developing nations would not have had access to. However, many society's view manufacturing independence as a strategic goal (e.g. Reshoring) especially in light of Drivers 1 & 2 where a nations reliance on other nations' manufacturing capability leaves them vulnerable and without the capability to combat their national needs.
Brokered Additive Manufacturing (BAM) will prove that these drivers can be met through a nation's highly distributed and diverse Additive Manufacturing (AM) capability if it can be effectively brokered.
BAM brings together world-leading researchers from the Schools of Civil, Mechanical and Aerospace engineering and Business Management, 300+ leaders in the AM industry (GTMA, AMUG, AT 3D Squared) and Model-Based Systems Engineering (CFMS), and industry/government initiatives (Reshoring UK) to create novel brokering of highly distributed and diverse manufacturing systems.
BAM's transdisciplinary approach will see the team:
1. profile Big Demand, dynamic production constraints and local, regional, national and global contexts to facilitate independence.
2. develop Business Models and Government Policy.
3. characterise AM capability.
4. create Production System boundary condition models and agent-based models of BAM that simulate both human and machine brokering of jobs at community, regional, national and international scales.
BAM solutions will be evaluated through controlled lab experiments, living labs and development of industry demonstrators. The solutions will give rise to a new class of production system that broker highly distributed and diverse manufacturing capability (e.g. AM). This will underpin factories of the future that are not confined to single facilities but are as diverse and distributed as the manufacturing capability they house, revolutionising society's production giving it greater flexibility and responsiveness to meet our future needs.
Publications
Cox C
(2022)
Improving Mixed-Reality Prototyping through a Classification and Characterisation of Fidelity
in Proceedings of the Design Society
Cox C
(2021)
DEMYSTIFYING DIGITAL X
in Proceedings of the Design Society
Giunta L
(2022)
Pro2Booth: Towards an Improved Tool for Capturing Prototypes and the Prototyping Process
in Proceedings of the Design Society
Giunta L
(2023)
A Living Lab Platform for Testing Additive Manufacturing Agent-Based Manufacturing Strategies
in Procedia CIRP
Giunta L
(2022)
Comparison of Three Agent-Based Architectures for Distributed Additive Manufacturing
in Procedia CIRP
Gopsill J
(2024)
Data mining prototyping knowledge graphs for design process insights
in Journal of Engineering Design
Gopsill J
(2021)
CAPTURING MATHEMATICAL AND HUMAN PERCEPTIONS OF SHAPE AND FORM THROUGH MACHINE LEARNING
in Proceedings of the Design Society
Gopsill J
(2021)
QUANTUM COMBINATORIAL DESIGN
in Proceedings of the Design Society
Description | The project has sucessfully: - Realised a world-first Agent-Based Manufacturing Living Lab of Additive Manufacturing machines - Created an opensource platform that enables Agent-Based Manufacturing Systems - Created clients to connect and interact with a wide variety of Additive Manufacturing machines - Demonstrated through numerical models and living lab studies that Agent-Based Manufacturing: -- Realisable (using today's technologies) - Through the development of a Living Lab and open-source codebase to create agent-based AM networks. -- Responsive - Individual machines update their own logics, goals, and objectives in real-time and based on current, historical, and forecasted demand. -- Resilient - A machine failing does not inhibit the process of other machines. -- Secure - Through the creation of a set of information sharing protocols that obscures the description of a job until it is accepted. On acceptance, design data is encrypted and transferred, never resting in the cloud. -- Reliable - Ephemeral services that can be re-initialised and duplicated in an instance to meet increase/decrease in demand and provide the redundancy specified by the community. -- Computationally Sustainable - Minimal central server requirements to broker connections and studies conducted to optimally utilise both cloud and edge compute (i.e., machine CPU) capacity. -- Scalable - Machines can be added to the network with little additional overhead. -- Inclusive - Everyone from hobbyist, education, workshops through to AM farms can connect and contribute to the network as control and governance remains at the machine-level. -- Fair - All who joined were able to find work for their machines to do. -- Flexible - Machines can join and leave the networks as they please. - Agent-based manufacturing are particularly suited for diverse and unpredictable deman scenarios - Quality across a network of organisations offering AM capability is consistent enough to enable jobs to be shared amongst one another. - Demonstrated the real-world system at Additive Manufacturing's largest industry event FormNext. - Developed the fundamental communication protocols that jobs and machines use to bid for work. - Idenitified optimal configurations of machine logics exist for different demand scenarios. |
Exploitation Route | The findings are being used by the team to develop follow-on: - EPSRC grants looking at what other information could be shared amongst jobs and machines to enhance their performance and the performance of the network, - AHRC grants seeking to enable green transition ecosystems by empowering communities to access and use local manufacturing capability - InnovateUK bids with project partners seeking to incorporate the technology into their offerings. The platform and papers are open source and access, respectvely enabling researchers to build on the research and for industry to take into practice. |
Sectors | Aerospace, Defence and Marine,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Manufacturing, including Industrial Biotechology |
URL | https://dmf-lab.co.uk/brokering-additive-manufacturing/ |
Description | The findings have been showcased at FormNext in Germany and has led to a number of follow-ups from the industry investigating how the technology could be pulled through into their practice. It remains early days but the work is making industry re-think how manufacturing and supply chains are currently operated. The opensource tools developed from the grant have received a followers and star ratings, and we will keep monitoring the number of downloads and how they are being used in the years to come. |
First Year Of Impact | 2023 |
Sector | Aerospace, Defence and Marine,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Manufacturing, including Industrial Biotechology |
Impact Types | Economic |
Description | Technology-Enabled Circularity - Building Communities Grant |
Amount | £20,000 (GBP) |
Organisation | GW4 |
Sector | Academic/University |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 06/2022 |
End | 03/2023 |
Title | Brokering Additive Manufacturing Digital Twin |
Description | A Digital Twin of the Brokered Additive Manufacturing Living Lab to test the scaling behaviour of the network reaching into the tens of thousands of jobs and machines. |
Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
Year Produced | 2023 |
Open Source License? | Yes |
Impact | The Digital Twin was used by project partner Centre for Modelling and Simulation to assess the scaling behaviour of BAM networks. |
URL | https://github.com/jamesgopsill/bam-digital-twin |
Title | Brokering Additive Manufacturing Platform |
Description | A platform that enables agent-based manufacturing for Additive Manufacturing machines. |
Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
Year Produced | 2022 |
Open Source License? | Yes |
Impact | The software has been used in a Living Lab of 15 machines by the research team to validate and verify the numerical models we have created during the project. It has also been used in demonstrations to industry and academia including being showcased at the world's largest Additive Manufacturing expo FormNext in Germany. |
URL | https://github.com/jamesgopsill/bam-living-lab-broker |
Title | Docker Multi-Objective Optimisation (DoMOO) |
Description | A demonstrator application of how OS-level virtualisation toolchains can be used to perform multi-objective optimisation across a diverse set of simulation models. |
Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
Year Produced | 2021 |
Open Source License? | Yes |
Impact | The demonstrator was used in a study that was published in the International Conference on DESIGN. |
URL | https://github.com/jamesgopsill/DoMOO |
Title | Eiger Client (Typescript) |
Description | The client enables web and node.js applications to communicate with Eiger.io fleet management networks thereby providing access to the MarkForged machines connected within. |
Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
Year Produced | 2023 |
Open Source License? | Yes |
Impact | The client was used to demonstrate BAM to Mark3D and MarkForged with one of their demonstrator networks. |
URL | https://github.com/jamesgopsill/eiger-client |
Title | Gateway to Research Client (Typescript) |
Description | The client enables web and node.js applications to query the Gateway to Research API. |
Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
Year Produced | 2022 |
Open Source License? | Yes |
Impact | Used by the research team to monitor the landscape of research projects. The information is used to support future bids and publications. |
URL | https://github.com/jamesgopsill/gtr-client |
Title | HP 3D Printing Client (Typescript) |
Description | The client enables web and node.js applications to communicate with the HP 3D printing API and the Additive Manufacturing devices connected to it. |
Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
Year Produced | 2023 |
Open Source License? | Yes |
Impact | The client was used to demonstrate BAM to owners of HP devices that utilise the HP 3D Printing fleet management software. |
URL | https://github.com/jamesgopsill/hp-3d-device-client |
Title | MyMiniFactory API Typescript Client |
Description | A Typescript client for the MyMiniFactory API. |
Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
Year Produced | 2023 |
Open Source License? | Yes |
Impact | The client allowed the users to access the repository of models stored in MyMiniFactory and submit them as jobs through the Brokering Additive Manufacturing network. |
URL | https://github.com/jamesgopsill/myminifactory-client |
Title | Octoprint Client (Typescript) |
Description | A client that enables web and node.js applications to communicate with the Octoprint 3D Printer API. |
Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
Year Produced | 2022 |
Open Source License? | Yes |
Impact | Enables any printer capable of communicating with Octoprint to join a Brokering Additive Manufacturing network and bid for work. The tool enabled us to perform Living Lab experiments with our Prusa printers in the lab. |
URL | https://github.com/jamesgopsill/octoprint-client |
Title | Repetier Client (Typescript) |
Description | The client enables web and node.js applications to communicate with Repetier Server thereby providing access to the connected Additive Manufacturing machines. |
Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
Year Produced | 2023 |
Open Source License? | Yes |
Impact | Enabled us to demonstrate BAM to organisations using Repetier Server. |
URL | https://github.com/jamesgopsill/repetier-server-client |
Title | Thingiverse API Typescript Client |
Description | A Typescript client to access the Thingiverse repository of AM parts. |
Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
Year Produced | 2023 |
Open Source License? | Yes |
Impact | The client allowed the users to access the repository of models stored in Thingiverse and submit them as jobs through the Brokering Additive Manufacturing network. |
URL | https://github.com/jamesgopsill/thingiverse-client |
Title | Ultimaker Client (Typescript) |
Description | The client enables web and node.js applications to communicate with Ultimaker 3D printers. |
Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
Year Produced | 2022 |
Open Source License? | Yes |
Impact | The client is used in the brokering of AM machines enabling Ultimakers to join the service and bid for work. |
URL | https://www.npmjs.com/package/@jamesgopsill/ultimaker-client |
Title | Ultimaker Cloud (Digital Factory) Client (Typescript) |
Description | The client enables web and node.js applications to communicate with the Ultimaker Cloud (Digital Factory) Management networks thereby providing access to the MarkForged machines connected within. |
Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
Year Produced | 2023 |
Open Source License? | Yes |
Impact | The client was used to demonstrate BAM to organisations using the Ultimaker Cloud (Digital Factory) management solution. |
URL | https://github.com/jamesgopsill/ultimaker-cloud-api-client |
Title | Web Serial 3D Printing Demonstrator |
Description | A demonstrator webapp that show how you can connect and send a print to your 3D printer via USB using a browser. |
Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
Year Produced | 2022 |
Open Source License? | Yes |
Impact | The webapp demonstrates the ability to control Computer Numerical Control (CNC) devices, such as 3D printers, through the web browser. This prevents the need for installing software on the PC managing the device and enables updates to be push via a simple refresh of the webpage. |
URL | https://jamesgopsill.github.io/web-serial-printing-demonstrator/ |
Description | Advanced Manufacturing Research Catapult Visit |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | TODO |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
Description | Contribution to Metal AM magazine |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | Contributed an article to Metal AM. A leading industry magazine. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
URL | https://www.metal-am.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2021/07/Metal-AM-Summer-2021-sp.pdf |
Description | Presentation and attendance at TCT 3SXTY |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | TODO |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
URL | https://dmf-lab.co.uk/blog/bam-tct-3sxty/ |
Description | Showcasing BAM at FormNext |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | TODO |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
URL | https://dmf-lab.co.uk/blog/dmf-lab-formnext-2022/ |