A List of Responders
Virtual Manufacturing Background Project
petrie@cdr.stanford.edu Charles Petrie@cdr.stanford.edu Stanford Center for Design Research WWW URL http://cdr.stanford.edu/
Next-Link is a set of protocols for "wrapping" legacy systems so that they can be used with a set of generic service agents. The service first implemented is the Redux' agent for coordinating distributed engineering, design and development processes. The formal model is hypothesized to be easily applicable to many design processes thus allowing a domain-independent coordination service to be mapped onto existing software. The coordination service detects waisted work and detects new opportunities for improving the process based upon past history and current changes in the process. The URL for Next-Link is "http://cdr.stanford.edu/NextLink/NextLink.html". Next-Link/Redux' seems to fall under the "Workflow" category. WRT to "Cross-functional Trades", Redux' does not provide domain-specific global optimization but does track Pareto optimization. ----------- MADEFAST is a recent ARPA experiment that may be of interest to the VM researchers. In six months, a group of university and industrial participants designed and built a missile-like visible light seeker. All design was done over the Internet using various collaboration tools, of which the most important was the WWWeb. People came and went. There was no traditional management though some people evolved to take leadership roles. All collaboration was done on a peer-to-peer basis. The experiment demonstrated that a virtual "dream team" could be assembled and could collaborate to develop a working complex artifact in a short time. The URL is: "http://www.madefast.org".
A List of Responders
Virtual Manufacturing Background Project
Virtual Manufacturing Home Page