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Mar 31, 2026

Smart Manufacturing Mindset™: i3X™ Explained

#Smart Manufacturing Mindset™ #Podcast #Smart Manufacturing Executive Council #i3X™

 

Manufacturers are navigating a growing challenge: fragmented, proprietary APIs across platforms, historians, and applications are creating integration complexity that slows innovation. The Industrial Information Interoperability eXchange (i3X™) is emerging as a solution—an open, vendor-agnostic API designed to standardize how applications interact with contextualized manufacturing data across platforms.

Whether you are a manufacturer, systems integrator, developer, or technology provider, download this episode to learn how i3x can impact the future of interoperable manufacturing architectures.

Top 5 Takeaways

  1. Address “API chaos” with a common, open information platform. Fragmented, proprietary APIs can slow integration and innovation. i3X provides a vendor-agnostic approach to standardize how applications access contextualized data, enabling scalable, AI-ready interoperability.  
  2. Standard approaches fuel execution. i3X is not about replacing existing technologies like OPC UA or MQTT, it’s about bringing them together through a common access platform. By defining a shared interface layer, i3X can enable interoperability without constraining technology choices.
  3. Design for interoperability. Take your environment from either/or to and. No single vendor can meet every need in today’s manufacturing landscape. i3X creates a unifying approach that allows diverse platforms, applications, and data sources to work together in a common framework.
  4. Lower the barrier to innovation and participation. With a flexible and open-source mindset, i3X makes it easier for developers, integrators, and manufacturers to engage. The goal is not rigid compliance, but practical adoption to enable real value across the manufacturing ecosystem.
  5. Engage early and shape what comes next. i3X is intentionally released as an early, evolving initiative. Its success depends on real-world testing, feedback, and contribution from across the ecosystem. The success of smart manufacturing relies on a community aligned around common standards.

Thank you to our panelists:

 

About CESMII

CESMII – the Smart Manufacturing Institute – has a total current investment commitment of $201M from Department of Energy funding and public/private partnership contributions, with a mandate to create a more competitive manufacturing environment in the US through advanced sensing, analytics, modeling, control, and platforms. CESMII is one of 17 Manufacturing USA institutes on this mission to increase manufacturing productivity, global competitiveness, and reinvestment by increasing energy productivity, improving economic performance and raising workforce capacity. University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) is the program and administrative home of CESMII. For more information about CESMII, its history and Smart Manufacturing, visit cesmii.org.

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“The open-source mindset is all about getting involved and sharing input. Take some time, learn about i3x™ and contribute to it.”
Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris

Director of Quality Test Systems, GE Appliances - A Haier Company

i3x-heroexplainer

Industrial Information Interoperability eXchange (i3X)

The Industrial Information Interoperability Exchange (i3X™) is an open, common API initiative proposed to address a growing interoperability challenge in modern manufacturing architectures: manufacturing data silo proliferation and API chaos. As manufacturers adopt heterogeneous software stacks from multiple vendors, the industry risks repeating past fragmentation seen with protocols, platforms, and namespaces — this time at the API layer.
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