Sustainment in Partnership with The Ohio State University Awarded US Air Force Contract to Address Manufacturing Workforce
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
11/04/2021
Duncan, OK – Sustainment Technologies announced today it has been awarded a Science Technology Transfer Research (STTR) contract by the US Air Force. This Phase I contract is in partnership with The Ohio State University’s Center for Design & Manufacturing Excellence (CDME) to apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to study workforce fragility in the manufacturing workforce and identify technology solutions towards the issue.
The STTR Program is administered by the Small Business Administration (SBA) but managed by the Department of Defense (DoD) for defense-related research. STTRs were developed to facilitate early-stage R&D between small businesses and leading U.S. research institutions. Sustainment has teamed with The Ohio State University’s CDME for this effort. CDME is considered one of the leading institutions for advancing additive manufacturing.
Market disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent cyber attack on gas pipelines have laid bare the fragility of our nation’s manufacturing supply chain. These events forced policymakers to look at our nation’s ability to meet critical manufacturing needs.
An aging industrial and manufacturing workforce, coupled with major gaps in skilled labor availability for advanced manufacturing, have been identified as areas contributing to our nation’s manufacturing base. To combat these issues, the US Government must identify roles for analytics, including machine learning in supporting stakeholder decision-making in changing environments.
“Coupling Sustainment’s core platform with CDME’s Security & Efficiency Laboratory has the potential to yield tremendous results for Air Force defense industrial base planners seeking to address the major shortfall in the manufacturing workforce and labor availability in the coming years,” stated Bret Boyd, Sustainment’s Co-Founder and CEO. “Our AI/ML algorithms and OSU’s significant experience in modeling industrial data to achieve valuable insights offers real promise to get in front of this issue” added Boyd.
Sustainment’s platform is designed to help manufacturing suppliers of all sizes more easily connect and conduct business with large commercial manufacturers and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). With its proprietary requirement-to-capability matching technology, Sustainment’s proprietary platform is considered the first AI-based Industry 4.0 market network platform for manufacturing.
About Sustainment
Sustainment is a software platform that is working to reimagine the American manufacturing base as a hyperconnected, secure, and resilient ecosystem of local and regional suppliers who can more easily interact and transact with the government and industry organizations that rely on them. Our software enables US-based manufacturers to find and engage with the critical suppliers they need to build secure, resilient, domestic supplier networks.
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Media Inquiries:
Bret Boyd
CEO, Sustainment
bret.boyd@sustainment.tech
