Biological Analogies in Manufacturing

[frank mill]

I am a senior lecturer at The University of Edinburgh and I am also a 
member of the Europeans Union's 'Intelligent Manufacturing Systems' 
Working Group.  I have been asked in this role to prepare a paper 
outlining the general areas of application for work based on 
biological systems.  Although I have covered obvious areas such as 
neural nets and genetic algorithms etc I have also been looking at 
biological manufacturing systems ( a large Japanese project ) and 
behavioural models for economic agents.  We have also been working 
with Swarm models in engineering design and planning and intended to 
do some work on more general manufacturing problems.
I was therefore greatly interested to hear that you are already doing 
something in this field.  As I am about to complete my paper, is 
there any information you can give me about your work?
(papers, web sites anything - I am due to finish my paper by 27 Feb)
I know this i rushed and thanks for taking the time to read this,
Cheers,
Frank Mill 
Frank Mill
Senior Lecturer - Manufacturing Planning Group
Department of Mechanical Engineering 
The University of Edinburgh
King's Buildings
EDINBURGH 
EH9 3JL
UK
tel ++44 (0)131 650 5673
fax ++44 (0)131 667 3677
email address@hidden
web http://www.mech.ed.ac.uk


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