Communities of Practice: Manufacturing Infrastructure

(c) Worcester Polytechnic Institute

New Communities of Practice: Manufacturing Infrastructure  

BioMADE is excited to announce two new infrastructure Communities of Practice (CoP). These communities – open to any member interested – are for members to collaborate, share experiences, and exchange ideas on data modeling and control systems.  

These Communities of Practice are ideal for: 

  • Companies that want to get the most from their process data 

  • Companies that are looking to upgrade existing control systems or getting to the next level of maturity in using their control systems  

  • People focused on engineering, process and product development, modeling and analytics, and/or process control 

  • People who are responsible for operating pilot plants or fermentation plants  

  • People interested in sharing their experiences, no matter if your company has operating assets or not 

Modeling and Analytics 

When piloting, often the “product” of the runs is the processing data acquired from the run. The focus of this Community is to share ways users can maximize the value of the data acquired from piloting. We want to dig deeper and explore techniques and methods used to develop process models to help us predict outcomes of runs, identify appropriate processing windows, and determine what makes a good Key Process Indicator (KPI) to track. 

Process Control and Automation 

The focus of this community is to share knowledge on industry-leading control practices. Fermenters and other downstream operations often require precise control with multiple causes of variation in the process. From the various Distributed Control Systems to SCADA controls and PLCs, we want to make a community where we can share our experiences with the vendor’s hardware and software solutions, control strategies for common unit operations, and state-based control.  In our meetings, we may also look further into more mature control concepts such as control loop health monitoring and alarm management.  

Logistics 

  • Members will meet virtually for one hour monthly, starting in June 2024 

  • Note that these are different than BioMADE Committees – which are elected and have governance responsibilities. These Communities of Practice are for knowledge-sharing. 

  • The time you spend participating in these Communities of Practices can count toward your organization’s in-kind membership dues 

Interested in joining?

Please reach out to BioMADE at infrastructure@biomade.org for further details and to express interest.