Atin Angrish

Binil Starly, Atin Angrish, Paul Cohen

The digitalization of manufacturing has created opportunities for consumers to customize products that fit their individualized needs which in turn would drive demand for manufacturing services. However, this pull-based manufacturing system production of extremely low quantity and limitless variety for products is expensive to implement. New emerging technology in design automation driven by data-driven computational design, manufacturing-as-a-service marketplaces and digitally enabled micro-factories holds promise towards democratization of innovation. In this paper, scientific, technology and infrastructure challenges are identified and if solved, the impact of these emerging technologies on product innovation and future factory organization is discussed.

Atin Angrish, Benjamin Craver, Binil Starly

In this paper, we present "FabSearch", a prototype search engine for sourcing manufacturer service providers, by making use of the product manufacturing information contained within a 3D digital file of a product. FabSearch is designed to take in a query 3D model, such as the .STEP file of a part model which then produces a ranked list of job shop service providers who are best suited to fabricate the part. Service providers may have potentially built hundreds to thousands of parts with associated part 3D models over time. FabSearch assumes that these service providers have shared shape signatures of the part models built previously to enable the algorithm to most effectively rank the service providers who have the most experience to build the query part model. FabSearch has two important features that helps it produce relevant results. First, it makes use of the shape characteristics of the 3D part by calculating the Spherical Harmonics signature of the part to calculate the most similar shapes built previously be job shop service providers. Second, FabSearch utilizes meta-data about each part, such as material specification, tolerance requirements to help improve the search results based on the specific query model requirements. The algorithm is tested against a repository containing more than 2000 models distributed across various job shop service providers. For the first time, we show the potential for utilizing the rich information contained within a 3D part model to automate the sourcing and eventual selection of manufacturing service providers.