I listened to Stephan Biller‘s talk on the future of manufacturing at GE.  I was saddened to hear that like Boeing GE also doesn’t have many of things that I thought they would have.

GE and Boeing both make jet engines and neither has the software to do the rescheduling and re-planning and renegotiation of process when bad things happen.  If something bad happens, people have to either re-plan or just wait for the part. Both options can costs a lot of money.

Also, they don’t have “smart” robots in their manufacturing plants. If one of them stops working then those robots that collaborate with that robot also must stop working. There is no fault tolerance when there should be. This also costs a lot of money.

Many AI and MAS/MAL type things that I am very interested in could be applied to solve these problems.  However, for these companies there would be a huge up-front cost in developing these systems since they would be state-of-the-art.

http://www2.technologyreview.com/emtech/13/