Convergence of Industry 4.0 and Regenerative Engineering to boost development of scaffolds created by hybrid additive manufacturing

Abstract

Industry 4.0 and its underlying technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), are usually portrayed as a way to enable communication in a workshop between the machinery and an intelligent control system, handle consumer demand for customized products, achieve a near-zero defect manufacturing process, and handle materials, energy consumption, and waste more efficiently, amongst others. Case studies on how the automotive, electronics, or aerospace industry benefit from Industry 4.0 implementation are readily available and surely, there are more to come. By contrast, scaffolds of Regenerative Engineering, are still in Research and Development and yet to be approved as a commercial regenerative procedure. A thorough analysis of the requirements was developed and the product manufacturing phases were modeled using Unified Modeling Language (UML). Business, structure, activity, class, and sequence diagrams, amongst others, are modeled using this standard and an ontology that converges Industry 4.0 technologies applied on Regenerative Engineering is established under the Ontology Web Language Description Logic (OWL-Dl). An architecture to augment a scaffold manufacturing cell with Industry 4.0 technologies is proposed. By using smart sensors, actuators, and the information they generate, a database with material and process variables is populated. This database can then be analyzed by smart algorithms to find the most effective parameters to manufacture a successful scaffold for tissue regeneration. Initial testing shows the feasibility of the proposed architecture and its ability to store relevant information of the produc