Drilling down on Smart Manufacturing – enabling composable apps

Manufacturing software services provisioned as unbundled “apps” could be significantly more flexible and less expensive to use than the current monolithic manufacturing applications. However, integrating such heterogeneous apps is not a trivial job. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has initiated a research and development program to advance science and engineering towards the vision of composable Smart Manufacturing systems. In April 2016, NIST hosted a workshop, called Drilling down on Smart Manufacturing – Enabling Composable Apps, to work with industry and academia on needed technical and standards-based solutions. This paper reports on key outcomes of this workshop.