MCADCafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – Aegis Software

By Michael Ford, Senior Director Emerging Industry Strategy, Aegis Software

Michael Ford

Unpredictability in 2023 is likely to be at least as challenging as it has been for the last few years, with continuing significant impact from global events. As an industry, the New Year drives us towards innovation, differentiation, sustainability, and speed, as the foundation of our business performance goals, whether pploying the latest innovations in materials and design technologies, or creating a significant evolution of existing technologies. In either case, communication through digitalization between design and manufacturing becomes critical, incurring the need for a new paradigm of trust, privacy and security where it comes to the data that ultimately exposes our core Intellectual Property (IP).

The world of technological innovation has been less affected recently than other areas, creating a backlog of innovation for some. The silver lining for 2023, is that we have all had a few years now, to get used to unsettled conditions, meaning that we have become more flexible in our outlook and abilities, with support for the implpentation of new ideas where such innovation brings business opportunity. This is the area in which we will see the most opportunity and change in 2023.

The digitalization of design through manufacturing, is a key area that speeds time to market, reduces new product introduction issues, improves product quality, yield and reliability, enhancing profit opportunity. So-called “digital twins” bring immensely more “invisible” value than is seen on screens in dpos. Participants in the engineering-chain between design and manufacturing, have opportunities to automate the processing of design information into any required machine instructions, as well as asspbly operation documentation. The adoption of standards will help establish the ecosystp for achieving this, though significant and justified concern about the security and privacy of sensitive data in the digital domain, will be a significant hindrance unless addressed.

The establishment of trust between organizations, especially between design and manufacturing, has always been a contentious issue. Having enough data to manufacture a product, also provides enough data for bad actors with access to the data to create their own product versions. Clones, copies and counterfeits in the market, contribute to losses associated with poor product quality and performance, as well as threats to Op brand-image. Factoring in that the, “right to repair” movpent is being strengthened in many geographies, the potential exposure of design data in digital form can only become more serious.

Technologies in the digital world, thankfully, have also been developing in recent years. The headline of course is the application of serious cybersecurity protection and related operational protocols, but this is only a part of the answer. Inherently, many people within manufacturing and repair, interact with original design data as part of their daily roles. As incentives for bad actors exist, with opportunity, so does risk. There are two important ways to be considered as to how to reduce this business-critical IP exposure.

The first is through the use of software automation. The more automated the creation of, for example, manufacturing instructions, both for machines and humans, the less the core design data needs to be exposed. The manufacturing engineering process, which is for most people using outdated engineering processes, requires significant manual data manipulation and confirmation, whereas using the latest automated tools, there is often no need for any human operations related to the core design data itself.

Extending this principle throughout the manufacturing process, each operation only needs access to a specific area of the design information, which leads to the second important way to reduce data exposure. The use of Verifiable Credential technology, an existing W3C standard, can be used to grant access to sensitive data by authorized automation parties at the specific point of use, without the need to locally store the design data, or otherwise expose the core data formats.

There is work to do in establishing a real digital ecosystp for design through manufacturing, which uses open interoperability to avoid the first and obvious major pitfall of establishing dependencies, and therefore trust, on commercial organizations and their solutions. Such an ecosystp will include W3C layers of security, with trust and security built upon cryptography using global distributed identifiers, such as W3C DIDs, that identify owners, users, and specific immutable data-sets within digital twins, as well as secure algorithms behind Verifiable Credentials, that allow manufacturing to be performed without disclosure of the full design data to non-automated or manual applications. This cumulates into a secure provenance of materials and products with their associated digital twins, throughout the supply-chain, again through an open ecosystp.

We are likely to see the early adoption of such innovation in 2023, setting out the framework for the truly interoperable future in digital manufacturing, sustainability, and repair. That is where things really start to get interesting, as we see applications that use such digital technologies as the foundation of their businesses, supporting innovation, differentiation, sustainability, and speed.

About Author:

Working for Aegis Software provides Michael the opportunity to apply his software for electronics assembly manufacturing experience to further drive technology solution innovation, satisfying evolving business needs in modern digital manufacturing.

Throughout his career, including eight years working in Japan, Michael has been instrumental in creating and evolving revolutionary software solutions for assembly manufacturing, that meet the most demanding expectations.

Today, Michael is an established thought leader for Industry 4.0 data-driven manufacturing, and an active contributor to industry standards. In 2021, Michael was recognized by IPC with a Fellowship Award, for contributions to standards including CFX, traceability, secure supply-chain and Digital Twin standards. Michael regularly contributes articles, columns and blogs in several leading industry publications.

Category: Industry Predictions

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 11:18 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.