Subject: categories: Industrial application

From: [email-masked] (Michael J. Healy 425-865-3123)
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 17:57:13 -0800

To all who work in category theory:

Today, my colleague Keith Williamson demonstrated an "industrial-strength" 
application of category theory.  He applied The Kestrel Institute's 
Specware(TM) system to generate a fairly large program from formal 
specifications.  The program optimizes the placement of electrical 
equipment in an airliner, minimizing wiring subject to constraints 
on how the equipment can be placed.

This is a demonstration of applied research, not yet in technology transfer.  
That having been said, the engineers are finding the program Keith generated 
to be potentially of great use.  Of more significance, though, is their 
interest in the way the program was developed: It can be either improved or 
adapted to other applications by modifying specifications and diagrams of 
specification morphisms, and then replaying the software generation---as 
opposed to having to work with the code.  Efficiency improvements to the 
code have already been demonstrated by working in this mode.  Our slogan 
is  "Re-use specifications, not software".

I don't want to oversell this thing; the devil is in the details, as usual, 
and much more work needs to be done on this approach.  But I'm obviously 
proud of the accomplishment.  When I started our project about four years 
ago, most here thought that applying category theory to anything was a crazy 
notion; others thought that applications, if any, would be 12 to twenty 
years out (depending on to whom we were talking).  Last year we had a 
proof-of-concept demonstration (actual code).  This year, the boss said, 
"OK, now scale it up."---and we did!

Ross Street has had an item giving an overview of our work linked to his 
home page for some time now.  We have a paper accepted in the Journal of 
Intelligent Manufacturing, but I don't know when it will appear.

Mike Healy

Here's the standard disclaimer I must provide:

This document does not represent an official position of The Boeing Company 
or any of its subsidiaries or suppliers.
--

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