A manufacturing technology readiness impact assessment transitional framework

Within any organization there is a need to assess the level of maturity of developing technologies and identify at what level they are fit for deployment in real application. TRLs were first developed by NASA over 25 years ago to prove a technology was suitable and reliable enough for the integration into space systems. This TRL scale has now been developed and adapted to suit the aerospace industry and is used to harmonize all technologies under development. However, despite this TRL structure being readily available, when driving technologies from TRL1 through to TRL9, the estimated costs and perceived tangible and intangible benefits involved when moving the technology forward through each TRL gate are not coherently quantified and broken down for the technology's investing customer, typically the manufacturing system specialist. To respond to this, the following research aims to develop a unique systematic methodology to assist manufacturing organizations in the technology investment validation through manufacturing impact assessment at each of the incremental TRL gates. This novel framework will assess the capability of a manufacturing system to incorporate the selected technology for development and assess at each maturity level, reducing risk of development investment and giving development value advice.