## 2 Requirements and Challenges of Manufacturing Engineering Processes  
### Requirements of Manufacturing Engineering Processes of Advanced Materials  
With the development of manufacturing engineering processes with advanced materials, the traditional pattern of research and development is no longer a requirement [12; 13]. Thus, from the view of academic research and industrial application, the requirements of manufacturing engineering processes are required to follow four aspects:  
1. Integration of full lifetime cycle data of advanced materials. Currently, new materials are being developed for manufacturing engineering processes. These new materials have different properties and are being improved at a declining price. From the materials' design to their service, the typical process of an advanced material's life may be divided into several parts, as shown in Figure 1. In order to establish a traceability mechanism for advanced materials, all data of different processes should be integrated and shared with the authorized institutes.  
Figure 1: Typical process diagram of an advanced material’s life.  
* 2 Numerical simulation development of materials research. Significant manpower and material resources used in repeated experiments are wasted. To reduce the development cost and shorten the development time for advanced materials, the use of numerical simulation experiments is rising [14], although such experiments are nonetheless based on physical simulation experiments and digital data. Figure 2 shows a flowchart of a material's life cycle with experimental tools, digital data and computational tools. 3 Opening and sharing services for safety and reliability of manufacturing engineering processes. As most manufacturing engineering is a process industry system, the failure of one component may cause the interruption of the whole manufacturing engineering process. However, lack of prior knowledge of failure modes and probability, limits the improvement of safety and reliability for manufacturing engineering. Manufacturing engineering directly reflects the level of a country's productivity, which is an important factor to distinguish between developing countries and developed countries [15]. In order to provide opening and sharing services to public users, the new concept of cloud manufacturing [16; 17] also aims to promote manufacturing with dispersed resources.
* 4 Requirement of collaborative innovation for manufacturing engineering processes. In manufacturing engineering, problems from different disciplines are integrated [18; 19; 20]. To achieve novel results, a multidisciplinary platform should be established. From the development trends of modern science and technology, significant achievements are coming increasingly from multidisciplinary collaborative innovation [21]. Figure 3 demonstrates a logical diagram of a multidisciplinary integrated platform for collaborative innovation. From Figure 3, the experimental resource, the computational resource, the private storage resource and the public cloud resource are integrated. The collaborative innovation strategy for manufacturing engineering processes is presented for researchers of materials science and manufacturing engineering.  
Figure 2: Flowchart of a material’s life cycle with experimental tools, digital data and computational tools.