The Nation's Largest Basic Research Effort in Manufacturing is at Michigan

"Most manufacturing systems today have a rigid structure," says Yoram Koren, director of University of Michigan Center for Reconfigurable Machining Systems and the Paul G. Goebel Professor of Engineering. "Neither the machines nor the systems they’re a part of can be changed very easily."

The Center is working to alter that. In 1996, a $12.4 million National Science Foundation grant established the Center for Reconfigurable Machining Systems as an NSF Engineering Research Center. In November 1999 the center was renewed by NSF for five years (through 2004) with a grant of $14.5 million. Today, the Center is the nation’s largest organized effort devoted to basic research in manufacturing. The National Research Council’s recent report, Visionary Manufacturing Challenges for 2020, identifies reconfigurable manufacturing as the No. 1 priority for the future of manufacturing.

With the globalization of trade, product demand is no longer fixed," explains Koren. "Companies need to be able to adjust their product lines, often incrementally, to quickly respond to the changing markets."

The Center collaborates with more than 20 companies on a wide-ranging project that has already begun to pay big dividends for American manufacturing–by designing methods for manufacturing systems and machines with changeable structures and integrated controls.

"When we proposed to these companies in 1994 to do the same type of research at a lower scale without NSF support, they refused," Koren says. "They claimed that beyond the financial support, the NSF provides a great deal of prestige, and that our NSF affiliation demonstrates the importance of the research, and the fact that it’s important is recognized by the scientific and industrial communities."

The Center has taken on such barriers to productivity improvement as "ramp up"–the time it takes to have a reasonable percentage of flaw-free products once a new manufacturing system is installed or reconfigured. "It can take anywhere from three months to three years to ramp up because of the difficulty in calibrating changes throughout the existing system," Koren explains. To solve the problem, the Center created a mathematically based "stream of variation" method that significantly reduces ramp-up time, which can shorten production time and save money.

"Our industry partners are excited about the prospects for this and other innovations generated by the Center," says Koren. Several automotive manufacturers are analyzing the Center’s methodology that compares production throughput and produced part quality. In the past year, the Center has applied for six U.S. patents and has already received a patent for a reconfigurable machine tool.

The Center has developed both undergraduate and graduate courses in manufacturing and is partnering with Northwestern University and, soon, with Wayne State University to conduct distance learning classes. "Without the NSF funding that produced the research results, we would not have been able to develop the graduate courses," says Professor Elijah Kannatey-Asibu, the Center’s associate director for education. Students from different disciplines (electrical, industrial, and mechanical) sit side-by-side, working together on project teams and sharing ideas at biweekly student meetings. "And because of the heavy industrial involvement in the Center’s research, the students get to interact very closely with people from industry," says Kannatey-Asibu.

"Without NSF support, this kind of integration between research and education would be impossible," Koren says.