Re: Biological Analogies in Manufacturing

[Ken Schmahl]

Frank,
I'm a staff engineer with LSI Logic Corp in California.  We do chip
design/manufacturing.  My expertise is in the front-end ASIC design
(nothing regarding manufacturing).

I've been interested in using adaptive agent systems in the
design of complex digital electronic systems.  Your comment, below,
regarding your work in using CAS for engineering caught my eye, so
I perused your web sites.  I found your groups paper "Feature Oriented
Design" but have no access to ACME archives being a member of IEEE
and ACM.  I'm also interested in your paper "Features as Agents, An
Alternative Paradigm for Concurrent Engineering", for which only the
abstract is available.

Would it be possible for you to send me a copy of these papers, postscript
or PDF?  I would be very grateful if you could help.  Though I don't
have a funded project for this sideline interest of mine I am pursuing
it in my (copious :^) free time.

Many thanks for your time and trouble,
Ken Schmahl                             address@hidden
LSI Logic, Milpitas, CA, USA            (408) 954-3508

Damn a man who doesn't read books.  The test of a man is
his knowledge of humanity, of the politics of human life,
his comprehension of the things that move men.
        -- William Mulholland

> 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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