This message reports on some continuation of the EI agenda, from my perspective.
1. Air Force ManTech, together with ARPA, has spent the last couple years folding EI concepts into one of the areas to be supported under a forthcoming effort on Virtual Manufacturing. The link is: EI is the set of solutions that empower the Virtual Enterprise (VE). VM is VE with simulation for some or all of the components. I've helped with this planning. Although the Dod budget is up and down, I'm pretty optimistic about this effort bringing new EI technologies into reality. Mickey Hitchcock (hitchmf%ml%wpafb@mlgate.ml.wpafb.af.mil) is the point of contact.
2. The Agility Forum has chartered a focus group on the Virtual Enterprise. I'm active in this group, which meets every six weeks or so. As such volunteer groups go, this one is first class and has produced some insights into the domain which were new to me. Orapong Thien-Ngern (ot00@lehigh.edu) is the point for invitations, information. Jim Jordan (jjordan@cup.portal.com) is the facilitator.
3. The forum is independently sponsoring a Best Practices survey/study to discover how world-class VE activity is currently supported. This has been underway for a month and, in a very compressed time schedule, will be complete by the end of Jan 95 for presentation/publication. I am the facilitator for this study, and would appreciate input from anyone who has a case were someone is being done well or innovatively. Educational failures are also useful. Proprietary protection can be arranged. I will travel to your site and, if you wish, brief you on any of the efforts listed here.
4. You may know that for the last decade I have been working on the "inside" of government EI-related programs. I have decided to re-enter the community of working technologists, with the intent of making useful EI products. Toward that end, I have been awarded a $1M ARPA contract whose purpose is effectively to architect one set of products. These will focus on boundaries among processes in the VE/VM environment, and create formally-based, quantitative metrics. A formal management science binding is one third of the effort; an implementors' binding (leveraging the ICEIMT results) is a second third. Finally, a test site will be exercised (this has not been identified, and will probably be drawn from candidates from #3 above). A relationship with CIMOSA of some kind is envisioned. Some funded positions are still open.
5. I am planning on submitting a bid to the Advanced Technology Project (ATP) to build the tools to support the above. The strategy will be to use the federation mechanism described in ICEIMT to federate the parametric model of metrics into the local tool sets used for decisions/control. This will be submitted to the Component-Based Software Focused Program in the spring. A first cut was submitted recently, with the only inadequacies in the proposal's description, not the project. So I expect success. I'd be happy to discuss this effort individually.
6. Independently, ATP is considering a program in VE. These typically are $80-120M. The program manager hasn't been announced yet. But there has already been a workshop, with two white papers submitted. I wrote one of these which essentially rehashes the ICEIMT results. Be happy to send it out to anyone interested. The new program manager at NIST is Barbara Goldstein goldstein@eeel.nist.gov). Another workshop is likely.
Best, Ted
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