The Advanced Manufacturing Office posted a Notice of Intent (NOI) entitled “Clean Energy Manufacturing Innovation Institute on Smart Manufacturing: Advanced Sensors, Controls, Platforms and Modeling for Manufacturing.” President Obama today announced that the Energy Department will lead this competition. The NOI supports the creation of the Clean Energy Manufacturing Innovation Institute on Smart Manufacturing: Advanced Sensors, Controls, Platforms and Modeling for Manufacturing (ASCPMM). This topic represents an emerging opportunity across the U.S. manufacturing firms—the convergence of information and communications technologies with the manufacturing processes to drive unprecedented real-time control of energy, productivity, and costs across our factories and companies. Broader application of smart manufacturing technologies has great potential in the energy intensive and clean energy manufacturing sectors.

The new public-private Clean Energy Manufacturing Innovation Institute seeks to develop, demonstrate, and transition to industry advanced sensing, instrumentation, monitoring, control, and process optimization using both advanced hardware and software platforms, as well as modeling and simulation technologies, for industrial automation.

The recent White House Advanced Manufacturing Partnership 2.0, a partnership with the private sector and university leaders, identified smart manufacturing as one of the highest impact priority areas for the development of new technology affecting manufacturing. AMP 2.0 recommended that the Energy Department take the lead in addressing gaps in the development of smart manufacturing technology.

Read the White House announcement.

For more information, see the full text of the Notice of Intent. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) are forthcoming.