MIT, General Electric work on crowdsourcing platform for manufacturing

April 6, 2012

by Lori Valigra

GE Global Research, along with MIT and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), have started a program that they say aims to revolutionize modern-day design and manufacturing based on a new crowdsourcing platform. The goal of the new “vehicleforge.mil” program is to develop a platform that would let a global community of experts design and rapidly manufacture complex systems such as military vehicles, aviation systems, and advanced medical devices, while safeguarding proprietary information, according to GE Global Research of Niskayuna, N.Y. Such “cyber physical systems” can take decades to develop, GE said, and the program aims to dramatically reduce that time.

The platform will support DARPA’s ongoing adaptive vehicle make (AVM) portfolio, through which DARPA is trying to attract breakthrough ideas and concepts for the design and manufacture of military vehicles and other complex defense systems.GE said the new crowdsourcing platform is a key part of its efforts to build the “Industrial Internet” to connect data, design tools, and simulations in a collaborative environment to accelerate the design of highly complex industrial systems.

“New crowdsourcing platforms will enable parties with specialized knowledge to securely interact with a global community of experts on the Industrial Internet, resulting in the creation of better, more robust product designs in a much shorter period of time,” Joseph Salvo, manager of the Business Integration Technologies Lab at GE GlobalResearch, said in a statement.Qing Cao, principal investigator on the project for GE Global Research said, “Developers from different spaces will be able to form design communities and create a common project space. This space will allow them to manage processes as a team and track changes and updates on their project.”

The platform will provide a marketplace where contributors can choose to expose their ideas to the public either as open source or as IP protected services. David Wallace, the co-principal investigator and MIT mechanical engineering professor said the marketplace is based on the MIT distributed object-based modeling environment (DOME) concept, an Internet-based computing infrastructure so users can publish their geometric design, computer-aided engineering, manufacturing, or marketing capabilities as live services that are operable over the Internet.

 The platform will embed social media connections to maximize engagement with crowds, according to GE. Upon completion now scheduled in the fall of 2012 the software developed under the contract will be open-sourced and used to support portions of vehicleforge.mil.

Founded on http://www.crowdsourcing.org/document/mit-ge-to-work-on-crowdsourcing-platform-for-manufacturing/13243