The National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM) and the Association For Manufacturing Technology (AMT) recently announced that four manufacturing organizations - DMG Mori Seiki USA, ITAMCO, Mazak Corporation, and Okuma America Corporation - will support the MTConnect Challenge 2 by providing participants access to data generated by their equipment for development and testing of manufacturing intelligence applications.

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense – Defense-Wide Manufacturing Science and Technology (DMS&T) ManTech Program, this second MTConnect Challenge: Creating Manufacturing Intelligence is seeking the development of software applications that harness innovation and manufacturing intelligence breakthroughs utilizing data acquired via the MTConnect standard.

MTConnect is an open, royalty-free communications standard intended to foster greater interoperability between manufacturing equipment, devices, and software applications thereby harnessing a wealth of information and data available from the shop floor.  The MTConnect Institute manages the development and further adoption of the standard.

“This is an exciting step forward for the MTConnect Challenge 2 which opened this past July 1,” said John Wilczynski, program manager at NCDMM.“By making equipment data streams available from machines through MTConnect compliant Agents, these corporations are allowing the MTConnect community to pull real-time data from equipment. We believe that allowing access to actual machine information will open this challenge to more developers, accelerating the development of new and innovative software applications which, naturally, is the focus of Challenge 2.”

Links to the MTConnect data streams are available in the rules section of the MTConnect Challenge 2 website.

MTConnect Challenge 2 began July 1, 2013, and will close on January 31, 2014. Winners will be announced at the [MC]2 2014 Conference, which will take place April 8-10, 2014, in Orlando, Floridas. The grand prize of $100,000 will be awarded for the top submission. The second place award recipient will receive $75,000, and the third place finisher will receive $50,000.