Intelligent Manufacturing € February € 1995 € Vol. 1
€ No. 2
Gensym (Cambridge, Mass.), a provider of software for creating
intelligent real-time systems, has joined the Abnormal Situation
Management (ASM) Consortium. Led by Honeywell, the consortium
proposes to demonstrate the technical feasibility of collaborative
decision-support technologies that can improve operations personnel's
performance in handling abnormal plant situations. The U.S.
Department of Commerce - through the National Institute of Standards
and Technology's (NIST) Advanced Technology Program - recently
awarded a 3.5 year, $8.15 million grant to the consortium.
The ASM Consortium includes technology vendors Gensym and Applied
Training Resources, specialty chemical manufacturer Novacor, and the
U.S. operations of seven petrochemical companies - Amoco, BP,
Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, Texaco and Shell. These chemical and
petrochemical companies use Gensym's family of G2 software to create
applications for intelligent process management, scheduling and
logistics, quality management, and process design and simulation.
Disruptions in industrial processes can result in costly accidents,
such as explosions and fires, as well as other problems, including
poor product quality, schedule delays and equipment damage. It is
estimated that the inability of automated control systems and
personnel to control abnormal situations costs the U.S. economy at
least $20 billion a year.
The consortium's proposed goal requires innovations in human-machine
interaction, system architecture, and system configuration tools.
More than 30 technology development studies will be conducted and the
results will be applied to the development of decision-support
prototypes. This technology will have applications in a diverse range
of industries, including petrochemicals, telecommunications and
health care.
Red Pepper Software (San Mateo, Calif.) has been founded to
provide intelligent system solutions to manufacturers. The company
has developed a class of planning and scheduling software it calls
ResponseAgents, which work as intelligent assistants. These tools
produce plans, monitor critical manufacturing variables, alert users
to problems as they arise, then optimize and recommend solutions in
real-time. The Response-Agents are now in beta testing at computing
and communications equipment suppliers, and will be commercially
available this spring.
ResponseAgents are based on intelligent agent technology, which are
software protocols that perform trial-and-error searching procedures
behind the scenes for computer users. Intelligent agents are able to
navigate through multiple computer networks, such as the Internet,
and across diverse computer systems to perform tasks for their
owners.
ResponseAgents are designed to complement and integrate with existing
transactional systems, enabling real-time responsiveness to customer
products. These agents integrate plant- or enterprise-wide materials,
capacity and customer demand information, and then apply advanced
optimization technology to rapidly generate plans or schedules.
Avalon Software (Tucson, Ariz.), a provider of manufacturing
solutions, has formed a partnership with IBM (Armonk, N.Y.) to
develop a link between manufacturing planning and engineering data
management systems. The goal is to enable engineering change
management and enterprise resource planning to be a single,
concurrent process so that product design changes can be immediately
communicated to production systems. The link will integrate Avalon's
CIIM software with IBM's Product Manager.