ISE Team Receives Grant to Develop AI-Enabled Manufacturing Framework

Making sure production stays on schedule and deliveries are made on time is an essential component of national security. If any part of the process breaks down, it could have significant and widespread consequences.

A team from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville's Department of Industrial Systems and Engineering is working on an AI-enabled intelligent manufacturing framework that unifies in-process certification, maintenance planning, and production scheduling into a single predictive decision system.

The project, titled "WISECERT: Workflow-Integrated Smart Evaluation for Certification and Resource Tracking in High-Value Component Manufacturing," is led by Joint Adjunct Assistant Professor Tom Berg, Dan Doulet Faculty Fellow and Professor Xueping Li, and Postdoctoral Research Associate Gerald Jones Jr.

The UT team was selected to participate in the National Security Prototype Center (NSPC)'s Seed Research and Development campaign, which jumpstarts collaboration between UT and Y-12. The NSPC will have an anchor facility, funded by UT, on the Oak Ridge Enhanced and Technology Training Campus and focus its efforts on solving complex manufacturing problems in the nuclear deterrence, nuclear energy, and defense industrial base business sectors. Announced in May 2025, NSPC will leverage UT's research in advanced materials and AI with the Y-12 National Security Complex's high-precision manufacturing capabilities for national security through this partnership.

"WISECERT has the potential to be a game changer in production efficiency," said Martin Williamson, senior director of Global Security and Strategic Partnerships at Y-12. "An AI system that leverages real-time monitoring data to inform product certification could radically improve production throughput and reliability."

Proactive processing

WISECERT integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), machine learning, model-based simulation, and optimization to verify that components meet regulations while proactively identifying risks to production performance.

The system generates adaptive, explainable certification documentation at each fabrication stage. The certification assessments are linked with maintenance schedules and machine health indicators.

"The work they are doing at the NSPC is very important to the national security, so you do not want to miss the deliverables. You need to meet your milestones in production," Li said. "The work we're doing with WISECERT is part of that big picture. We want to make sure the mission is accomplished. We want to provide the tools to enable delivery of Y-12's national security deliverables."

WISECERT's forward-looking analysis provides a predictive strategy of how maintenance actions, machine failures, or supply disruptions can impact production, energy consumption, and cost. The system is able to catch potential issues before they happen instead of after the fact, which can reduce waste and save money.

"Right now, it's a very reactive compliance checkpoint because they have been doing this process manually and they do it over and over and over. What can we do with RAG is to have AI understand what it takes to make sure this piece of equipment is certified and then plug that into the process to automate this," Jones said. "The end goal of this is to bring intelligence into that certification process."

Enhanced collaborations

Given the sensitivity of the information, it wasn't always possible to involve AI and machine learning in the manufacturing and production process at Y-12 and other facilities with similar national security interests.

"We needed a way to share this information appropriately between the computer systems. But the computer systems were also designed to be separate, so we needed a smart way to exchange the right information without violating any other protocols or procedures," Berg said. "We can share this information now because the tools exist to work within those protocols."

The WISECERT project is another example of the strong partnership between UT and Y-12. The university has an office devoted for Y-12 workers to help enhance the work they can do together.

"They can come here, plug into the government network, and do the actual work," Li said. "This level of collaboration is very unique and a very significant aspect of this partnership. Y-12 personnel come here a few days a week and work with us, with our students, and with our researchers by their side."

Provided by University of Tennessee at Knoxville