Instant Foundry Adaptive Through Bits (iFAB)
Abstract
Instant Foundry Adaptive Through Bits (iFAB), provided the groundwork for the development of a foundry-style manufacturing capability--taking as input a verified system design--capable of rapid reconfiguration to accommodate a wide range of design variability and specifically targeted at the fabrication of military ground vehicles. The iFAB vision was to move away from wrapping a capital-intensive manufacturing facility around a single defense product, and toward the creation of a flexible, programmable, potentially distributed production capability able to accommodate a wide range of systems and system variants with extremely rapid reconfiguration timescales. The specific goals of the iFAB program were to rapidly design and configure manufacturing capabilities to support the fabrication of a wide array of infantry fighting vehicle models and variants. Once a given design was developed and verified, iFAB took the formal design representation and automatically configured a digitally-programmable manufacturing facility, including the selection of participating manufacturing facilities and equipment, the sequencing of the product flow and production steps, and the generation of computer-numerically-controlled (CNC) machine instruction sets as well as human instructions and training modules. iFAB was mostly an information architecture. Only the final assembly capability needed to be co-located under a single roof in anything resembling a conventional fabrication facility; the rest of iFAB could be geographically distributed and can extend across corporate and industrial boundaries, united only by a common model architecture and certain rules of behavior and business practices. The final assembly node of the iFAB Foundry was the Joint Manufacturing and Technology Center (JMTC) at the Rock Island Arsenal (RIA).
Document Details
- Document Type
- Accomplishment
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2016
- Source ID
- 1b9cb5ba01da5c591d854bef430dc0c3