High Performance Cutting in the New Era of Digital Manufacturing - A Roadmap

We are rapidly moving into the new era of digitisation, into an era of the Massive Internet of Things - towards the Gigabit Society and towards 5G Technology. The implications are truly far reaching. Rapid transformation through the implementation of INDUSTRY 4.0 is becoming visible in industries all over the world. Disruption to the more traditional industrial practices and processes is inevitable. High Performance Cutting is no exception. Developments in the Internet of Things (IoT) opens up new and extremely powerful capabilities to help us gain a significantly deeper understanding of the fundamentals of cutting processes and offers entirely new connectivity possibilities at all interfaces, some old and some new, 'between the Chip Root and the Cloud'. This supports us in our attempts since the foundation of CIRP in 1951 to remove technological roadblocks and can lead on a new journey towards new and unprecedented scientific/technological developments as well as new business models for companies involved in the various elements of the supply chain for cutting processes (DIN 8580). 'Performance' will take on a new and unanticipated meaning over what was originally meant when we established this CIRP-HPC Conference back in the early 2000’s. In this paper a critical review of a previous roadmap is undertaken for cutting processes presented in a CIRP Keynote Paper in 2003 by Byrne, Dornfeld and Denkena [1] and new thoughts and ideas are presented on a vision for a 2020 skeleton Roadmap for High Performance Cutting in the new age of Digitisation.