About

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The SUTD Digital Manufacturing and Design and (DManD) Centre has been established with support from the Singapore National Research Foundation to carry out cutting-edge research that will create the frontiers of digital design and manufacturing.

We are entering a new era of manufacturing that is increasing global, driven not simply by labor prices, but by rapid evolution of consumer preferences, fragmentation of demand, and pressures for mass customization in new markets, especially in developing markets.

This new era will be enabled by highly-integrated digital advances in

• physical design models at multiple abstraction layers to sequence assurance of manufacturability and performance (layered model checking of physical designs)
• simulation-based product and process design,
• digital prototyping and manufacturing processes including additive manufacturing, laser machining, robotic fabrication, and technologies still to be invented,
• model/stimulation based-design of manufacturing logistics for supply chains and life cycle monitoring, all underpinned by emerging big data engineering.

In all of this, an increasingly blurry line is rapidly emerging between materials and components as well as products and services. It is also becoming clear that bringing design and manufacturing closer together, both physically and temporally, is a key to growing an advanced innovation economy.

DManD will advance digital manufacturing in a strategic and holistic manner, bringing together modern and emerging technologies (and attendant basic science and engineering) along the digital pathway that will accelerate Ideas-to-Things. We will carry out research that will exploit new design windows enabled by digital manufacturing technologies to create unique, optima, and previously unobtainable products.