CSCE Professor Liu Received NSF Grant

frank liu

Prof. Xiaoqing “Frank” Liu, Department Head and Rodger S. Kline Endowed Leadership Chair in Computer Science and Computer Engineering (CSCE), was awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to conduct research on architecture and protocols for scalable cyber-physical manufacturing systems.

Cyber-physical manufacturing systems have potential to transform manufacturing industry in a significant fashion by sharing manufacturing resources, operating manufacturing machines, and connecting customers with manufacturing resources over the Internet. It integrates networking, embedded computing, control, manufacturing, service and cloud computing technologies to increase manufacturing efficiency and resource utilization. 

Despite its promising future, there are many significant challenging issues toward realization of its potentials and its wide adoption in manufacturing industry. One of them is scalability of cyber-physical manufacturing systems. Cyber physical manufacturing systems need to be highly scalable and can integrate capabilities and services of a large number of manufacturing machines and other resources, operate and control them, and make them available to customers worldwide over the Internet. Another issue is network protocols for communicating manufacturing services and controlling manufacturing machines in factory floors over Internet. 

In this project, new architectures and protocols for scalable cyber-physical manufacturing systems will be explored to address the above challenging issues. The technology developed in this project is expected to help better connections between manufacturers and consumers, make easier to exchange manufacturing services across organization boundaries, and increase utilization of manufacturing resources and reduce their idling time. 

The project is conducted as a joint effort between Prof. Frank Liu in the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and Prof. Ming Leu and Prof. Maggie Cheng in the Missouri University of Science and Technology.