Work in Progress: Developing a Comprehensive Approach to Teaching Smart Factory Operations

This Abstract presents the rationale, setup, and curriculum integration of a new smart factory lab as a significant component of a smart manufacturing engineering bachelor's degree program. For a new engineering graduate to enter the cyber-physical Industry 5.0 ecosystems of technologies with requisite skills and an adaptable mindset, the preparatory educational environment must adopt new tools and incorporate hands-on experiences applicable to smart manufacturing. A new small-scale smart factory is being developed for this purpose with features tailored to the educational environment, including reconfigurability, modern technologies (vision, sensing, AI, and robotics), and a manufacturing execution system to examine cybersecurity and reliability. The lab-factory, curriculum details, and proposed utilization, including professional training, are discussed in this paper.