GROW win Innovate UK sponsorship
Innovate UK is the UK’s governmental innovation agency aiming to find, support and develop innovative businesses to speed up economic growth.We’re proud to announce that GROW has joined their sponsorship program, and Innovate UK will support us in a pursuit of finding solutions for the challenges of secure distributed manufacturing.
GROW win Innovate UK sponsorship 2016.05 Innovate UK is the UK’s governmental innovation agency aiming to find, support and develop innovative businesses to speed up economic growth.We’re proud to announce that GROW has joined their sponsorship program, and Innovate UK will support us in a pursuit of finding solutions for the challenges of secure distributed manufacturing. The automotive and aviation spare parts industry is one of the largest in the world. According to the traditional view on economies of scale, production of spare parts is centralized, the product is made in big quantities, to then be stored and shipped globally when required. However, in the advent of Additive Manufacturing (AM) technology, it will soon be both technically and commercially feasible to manufacture physical products closer to the point and time of demand using a network of distributed manufacturers – significantly reducing downtime, logistic costs and inventory sizes. However, implementation of distributed manufacturing, poses some challenges. There is a number of concerns regarding the transmission and sharing of valuable AM designs and data, especially because of loss of control over confidentiality and manufacturing process (and therefore product integrity), as well as lack of secure and reliable audit mechanisms. As a result, only 1% of all parts are manufactured using distributed AM, despite its many advantages.
To address these problems, we will work to expand development of the first system to transmit confidential AM designs and manufacturing instructions DIRECTLY to Additive machines in a secure, encrypted manner, enabling full control over the distributed AM process. The project goals will be to achieve deeper integration with Additive hardware and integrate GROW with software tools used in Additive. The project will also help work on enabling improved encryption options for the future including algorithms resistant to quantum computer decryption.
