SMART: A system-level manufacturing and automation research testbed

Manufacturing testbeds are used to develop, test, and analyze technologies that address some of the current challenges facing the manufacturing sector. This paper provided a classification of manufacturing testbeds and categorized several existing testbeds based on each category specification. In addition, this paper introduced the System-level Manufacturing and Automation Research Testbed (SMART), a multidisciplinary testbed used for manufacturing research and education at the University of Michigan. SMART consists of a physical serial-parallel line equipped with sensors to collect data at both the machine and system level. Various tools were used to aggregate, analyze, and display this data in a cloud infrastructure. The system setup allowed for the discovery, testing, implementation, and analysis of new technologies. In addition, different simulations of SMART were developed to augment and study the testbed at the machine and system levels. A number of ongoing projects utilize SMART's physical and virtual capabilities. These projects cover a wide variety of areas, including centralized and decentralized control of manufacturing systems and performance monitoring and analysis.