A cooperative partnership between Industry and Universities to build the digital factory of the future.
The Center for Digital Factory Innovations (CDFI) is an industry-university partnership with a mission to develop and share best practices and strategies that enable the digital manufacturing future.
The digital future is one of interconnected, self-aware factories and processes that manufacture products through automation and the marriage of human-machine interactions.
Working together with industry to build this digital future, CDFI research is driving sustained manufacturing performance improvements to deliver economic, quality, and technical advantages to companies like yours.
Step into tomorrow’s digital factory
It may not look at all like today’s factory…
Customers will interact with the factory directly—placing the order online, and perhaps paying more for expedited service (think dynamic pricing in the airline industry). Products (or their digital twin) will talk to the machines (perhaps a correction is needed to meet specifications). Instead of reading reports, production managers will walk the floor and verbally “ask” machines for their status. And then tell the machines to change the priority to accommodate a priority order. Machine tools will look and operate differently, too. Robots and machine tools will be completely integrated. And new processes like hybrid manufacturing will reduce the footprint of the factory.
The purpose of this center is to drive innovative research with our industrial partners that enables the future digital factory by allowing the synchronization of processes—cyber, physical and human—and creating a manufacturing system endowed with efficiency, resilience, and intelligence. The Center is a partnership between Industry and three University sites: University of New Hampshire, the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, and Georgia Tech. Each of the Universities has a unique set of abilities and facilities that work in concert to reach achieve the mission of the center.
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