Software developers have long been able to collaborate through community sites like those based on Git and Apache Allura to contribute code, synchronize software builds, and track issues around a project. And games like Minecraft allow people to collaborate in building virtual environments with embedded behaviors—including "mods" that leverage the games' simulation capabilities to interact with other objects in a virtual world. Now, an open-source Web platform originally designed with Defense Department funding could let communities collaborate to build more tangible things—like tanks, planes, and consumer appliances.

Called the Digital Manufacturing Commons (DMC), and sponsored by a collection of universities and major manufacturers through UI Labs' Digital Manufacturing Design and Innovation (DMDI) Institute, the platform puts design, modeling, and simulation tools in reach of collaborative teams of all sizes, and allows designs to be "compiled" and tested like software projects before being prototyped in the physical world. If it gets traction, the software could open up the rapidly growing "digital manufacturing" space to allow even the smallest maker teams to partner with the largest manufacturing and distribution companies, allowing gadget-makers to scale into global players.

At this week's Big M Manufacturing Conference in Detroit, GE and UI Labs—a research center funded by a public-private partnership to help advance manufacturing technology—announced the roll-out of the Digital Manufacturing Commons, which GE Research Global Technology Director for Manufacturing and Materials Technologies Christine M. Furstoss said is "like massive multi-player online (MMO) gaming meeting the real world of manufacturing."

"Like MMO, we can build things digitally before they’re even built with raw materials in a real factory," she said.

Git for tanks

DMC evolved from a project launched four years ago by DARPA called Adaptive Vehicle Make. The AVM program set out to change the rules of how complex systems (such as tanks, planes, and other expensive things the military buys) are designed and built by adopting the approaches of open-source and community software. DARPA brought aboard MIT and GE Research to create a set of community tools that engineers, designers, and manufacturers could use to collaborate on the creation of new systems, giving them the ability to essentially compile and debug their designs with software before ever building a prototype.

"I had been interested in open source platforms for some time when DARPA put a call out to reduce the time to design and make complex systems by five times," said Joseph Salvo, manager of the Complex Systems Engineering Lab at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, New York, in an interview with Ars. "The real issue on the table in the program was that we continually embed software and intelligence into increasingly complex machines and so the systems have a tendency to generate emergent behaviors—unplanned behaviors that emerge from the complexity of the system."

Detecting these problems early in traditional modeling and simulation approaches was close to impossible, Salvo explained. "You have all these disciplines when you're building a complex system: thermal models, aerodynamic models, and in the case of DARPA, blast models."

"The models don't always coincide with one another so you have to do translations," he continued. "The idea was to have a consistent environment where all these things would interact with each other—and you'd get validation and verification if you used all these tools together." The system needed to ensure that all of the simulation and modeling tools would interact with each other properly to verify designs as they were built—with changes in a component's design automatically reflecting in thermal models and software simulations.

The environment also had to allow people to collaborate across those disciplines, and find both the people and tools they needed. "You had to have this marketplace to allow all these tools to work together," Salvo recounted. "You need to get all these different people to work together, so you need a collaboration platform that can link the tools, the data, the people, and all the communications."

The tools the program created, originally called VehicleForge, provided simulation and modeling capabilities that would allow design teams to use "correct-by-construction" approaches to check their work—and speed their efforts to manufacturing much faster than traditional design approaches. After working on AVM and VehiceForge's tools, Salvo started building projects at GE.

"It was very popular, but we saw it would be more valuable if we engaged the manufacturing community at large," he said. "We had done some crowdsourcing projects that showed there's huge potential to tap into brilliant people out there that traditionally don't have access to the tools or the data and can't get on the teams to contribute to these fantastic designs that we have to deliver to our customers. So it all really just made sense to team up with UI Labs and other partners and make this a paradigm shifting event."

Team of rivals



UI Labs is a sort of DARPA for industry—a collaborative effort of the manufacturing industry and universties that is funded by "a public-private partnership," said Bill King, the chief technology officer for the DMDI Institute at UI Labs. "We run pilot tech projects driven by the needs of industry, and focus on risky or early stage techs that are too risky for any one company to fund or execute on their own." There are over 100 industry members of UI Labs today, he said, with GE being one of the largest supporters.

DMDI Institute, located at Goose Island in Chicago, is one of the "nodes" in the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI), launched last year as part of the Revitalize American Manufacturing Act. "It's a $320 million, five-year project," King said." Over the next two years, DMDI will scale up the Digital Manufacturing Commons to support up to 100,000 users. "The objective is to connect manufacturing to designers, so we can bring together desingners and makers," King said, "so people can collaborate. We've seen that the biggest pool of value for manufacturers is to close the gap between designers and makers, so people who want to design things can tack their ideas up in a virtual environment and find factories and distributors to bring things to market."

Simulation and modeling instances will run on virtual machines in the cloud, and be provisioned as needed. "The whole system is going to be free to use," King said. "You can come to the website, log on, and you can exchange data." There will be three primary feature sets to the Digital Marketing Commons—file and data sharing services where teams can bring in data from both the tools within the service and external software.

Next, there's also a service marketplace, where "people can take designs and algorithms and publish them into a community," King explained, "and connect that with analysis tools—modeling and simulation." Experts can offer the designs and code as components for other project.

The third core component of the Digital Manufacturing Commons is a shared set of systems engineering tools that can process those designs and algorithms, creating what King described as a "complex service chain" where data can be updated and published in real time.

In other words, if an embedded system developer updates a controller's behavior in a model, that change is instantly applied to all the larger models that contain it—and the impact of the changes can be rapidly assessed by everyone involved in the product's creation. In the end, the data can be used to drive the manufacture of all the components of the design—not quite like sending a job to a 3D printer, but much more rapidly than factories have put out products in the past. In addition to the first components, King said, "We're going to continue to develop the capability [of DMC], because there will be other features and functions."

The major players in backing DMC include Proctor & Gamble, Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. "There are about a dozen big manufacturing comanies involved in this that will help us bring this to scale," said King. "They all want the same thing - which is how can they get a supply chain that works, and how can they bring more innovators in as suppliers. What this platform does is it reduces the barriers to entry— it makes it very easy for small businesses, entrepeneurs and innovators to get online and start using digital tools." The DMC part of an overall push to "change the manufacturer paradigm," King explained, "so we want to engage small and medium enterprises as well as create a teaching environment to bring people in from schools and the maker movement, and expose them to sophisticated tools and environments—and change the way they typically interact with manufacturers."

"In many cases, you would say some of the partners are traditionally competitors," said Salvo. "But that's the paradigm shift here. This is a basic functionality for digital manufacturing that's in many cases pre-competitive— it can bring a thousand times more brain power in to solve a problem, then companies can choose what part of the problem they want to focus on to differentiate." Much like the open-source community around Linux and other major projects, DMC could help in "building a community of like-minded individuals," Salvo added, "and I would not be surprised if non-tech people join this community—if they have problems they want to solve, they'll know they'll be listened to and could find teams that can solve their problems."