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With the worldwide spread of Covid-19, employees in the manufacture of medical masks organize masks.
A new NSF-funded project is developing a model to help manufacturers pivot and manufacture personal protective equipment.
At the start of the Covid-19 crisis, the state of Massachusetts put together a manufacturing emergency team to respond to desperate needs for personal protective equipment (PPE), particularly masks and robes. The Massachusetts Emergency Response Team (M-ERT) – supported by WITH Faculty, students, staff, and alumni – helped local manufacturers produce more than 9 million PPE items, as well as large quantities of hand sanitizer, disinfectant, and test swabs.
Building on the experience and knowledge gained through the work of M-ERT, a new project, recently funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is developing a network collaboration model designed to help ecosystems organize themselves quickly and enable manufacturers to “pivot” in an emergency from the manufacture of their standard products to the manufacture of PPE or other urgently needed goods. Elisabeth Reynolds, executive director of the MIT Task Force on Future Work and the MIT Industrial Performance Center, John Hart, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity, Ben Linville-Engler, Industry and Certification Director of The System Design and Management Program and Haden Quinlan, program manager of the MIT Center for Additive and Digital Advanced Manufacturing Technologies, collaborate with researchers from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative.
“The Massachusetts manufacturing ecosystem has proven to be extremely valuable in response to Covid-19,” Reynolds says, “and it has been activated in important ways because of the M-ERT collaboration.”
The NSF grant allows researchers to collect and learn from the data from recent emergency manufacturing efforts and design a network and collaboration model that can be used for manufacturing in future crises. The RESPOND (Rapid Execution for Scaling Production of Needed Designs) network will help build a multidisciplinary, diverse stakeholder ecosystem that can support the production of new products in large quantities in times of crisis.
“With this grant, we can retrospectively investigate what we’ve done [with M-ERT]”Says Linville-Engler,” so that we can do this proactively in the future and make efforts to develop and create ecosystems. We can see how people work in such an information network. ”
Linville-Engler describes this type of network modeling as a consideration of the “network of networks” with developing uncertainties, requirements and requirements across the various nodes.
“This project shows important ways of using digital tools to advance manufacturing in the regional and national areas,” says Hart. “We hope that we can implement our findings on a large scale and contribute to making the manufacturing ecosystem more agile.”
In addition to the RESPOND network project, a number of other MIT-based manufacturing efforts have recently been federally funded. A new online course on agile manufacturing is being designed and taught by Hart, Linville-Engler and Quinlan. Reynolds, along with Julie Shah, Associate Professor at the Department of Aerospace and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Paul Osterman, Professor of Human Resources and Management at MIT Sloan, also received an NSF Design Fellowship in Understanding Man. Technology frontier as part of research related to the MIT Task Force on Future Work.
“These efforts mean a renewed commitment to manufacturing in this country,” says Reynolds. “We are at a real turning point in the world of advanced manufacturing, punctuated by new data and new challenges.”
