Good connectivity between different pieces of equipment on the shop floor is important for their communication with each other, which eventually enable smart decision-making. This is one of the aspects of the fourth Industrial revolution, which is all set to re-map manufacturing businesses to deliver higher operational efficiency, better business outcomes and customer satisfaction through digital transformation. The digital landscape is continuously evolving for the manufacturing industry as businesses are adapting to the change and even anticipating changes before they occur. Fast-changing customer expectations and technological improvements that have brought a paradigm shift in other industries has begun to show the similar results in the manufacturing sector as well. Smart manufacturing is giving rise to smart factories Smart manufacturing is more than just automation, as it enables learning and adapting to the ever changing market conditions, delivering higher efficiency in quality control, than that performed by Quality Inspectors.

While many advances have been made, it still has been difficult for non-programmers to create objects made of many materials (or mixtures of materials) without a more user-friendly interface. But this week, a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will present "Foundry," a system for custom-designing a variety of 3-D printed objects with multiple materials. "In traditional manufacturing, objects made of different materials are manufactured via separate processes and then assembled with an adhesive or another binding process," says PhD student Kiril Vidim?e, who is first author on the paper. "Even existing multi-material 3-D printers have a similar workflow: parts are designed in traditional CAD [computer-aided-design] systems one at a time and then the print software allows the user to assign a single material to each part." In contrast, Foundry allows users to vary the material properties at a very fine resolution that hasn't been possible before.

Over the last few decades, globalization has created great wealth and brought millions out of poverty. Today, a combination of technology, politics, and social pressures seems to be reversing globalization. While the new technology will continue to create wealth, it will favor developed countries. The increasing regionalization of economies and differences in rates of growth will create instability and challenge international security arrangements. The Economist defines globalization as the "global integration of the movement of goods, capital and jobs." The combination of labor cost advantages, efficient freight systems, and trade agreements fueled globalization by providing regional cost advantages for manufacturing. Over the last six decades, it transformed agricultural societies into industrial powerhouses.