Manufacturing industry has witnessed a gradual transition from being a heuristic-driven labor-intensive set of processes to a sophisticated set of automation and model-driven processes where each operation unit in the production chain is automatically controlled and operated at a preset optimum regime. While incremental improvements in overall manufacturing efficiency have been steered by advan...

Process improvement in a large-scale industrial environment is a challenge for numerous reasons. Besides others it is difficult to convince and motivate a critical mass of the staff and it is particularly expensive to train a large number of developers and managers. Established Software Configuration Management (SCM) practices pave the way to improve in a more efficient “bottom-up fashion” by p...

We explain St almarck's proof procedure for classical propo-sitional logic. The method is implemented in a commercial tool that has been used successfully in real industrial veriication projects. Here, we present the proof system underlying the method, and motivate the various design decisions that have resulted in a system that copes well with the large formulas encountered in industrial-scale...

RPCs with float glass electrodes (GSC or glass RPC) have been proposed as active elements for large-detectors (e.g. MONOLITH). Industrial large-scale GSC production has to be standardized in order to have homogeneous, affordable and reproducible detectors. A wide range of industrial glass treatments are already exploited by both glass and automobile industries. Our efforts are aimed to import a...

The recent start-up of several full-scale 'second generation' ethanol plants marks a major milestone in the development of Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains for fermentation of lignocellulosic hydrolysates of agricultural residues and energy crops. After a discussion of the challenges that these novel industrial contexts impose on yeast strains, this minireview describes key metabolic engineerin...

In the mid-1970s, the phrase “small is beautiful” became a counterculture slogan against the industrial threat to the environment and the scarcity of resources. Arguing against excessive materialism and meaningless growth, the late Dr. Ernest Friedrich Schumacher—the author of Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, promoted the use of small-scale technology to benefit both humanki...

A key aspect of industrialization is the adoption of increasing-returns-to-scale, industrial, technologies. Two other well-documented aspects are that industrial technologies (ITs) are adopted throughout intermediate-input chains and that they use intermediate inputs intensively relative to the technologies they replace. These features of ITs combined imply that countries with access to similar...