CELEX: 31985D0558
Language: en
Date: 1985-12-10 00:00:00
Title: 85/558/EEC: Council Decision of 10 December 1985 adopting the 1986 work programme for the European Strategic Programme for Research and Development in Information Technologies (ESPRIT)

31 . 12 . 85                              Official Journal of the European Communities                                 No L 365 / 1
                                                                  II
                                              (Acts whose publication is not obligatory)
                                                        COUNCIL
                                                      COUNCIL DECISION
                                                       of 10 December 1985
              adopting the 1986 work programme for the European Strategic Programme for Research and
                                        Development in Information Technologies (ESPRIT)
                                                           (85 /558 / EEC )
THE COUNCIL OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES,                               HAS DECIDED AS FOLLOWS :
Having regard to the Treaty establishing the European                                            Article 1
Economic Community,
                                                                       The ESPRIT work programme set out in the Annex is
Having regard to Council Decision 84/ 130/ EEC of                      hereby adopted for 1986.
28 February 1984 concerning a European programme
for research and development in information technol­
ogies ( ESPRIT) ('), and in particular Article 3(2)                                              Article 2
thereof,
                                                                       As a target figure, 25 % of the Community's total con­
Having regard to the draft work programme submitted                    tribution to new projects may be allocated to new pro­
by the Commission ,                                                    jects which fall below the threshold referred to in the
                                                                       third indent of Article 6 (2) of Decision 84/ 130/ EEC .
Whereas the Committee referred to in Article 4 of De­
cision 84/ 130/ EEC has been consulted ;                                                         Article 3
Whereas the projects identified fall within the areas                  This Decision shall take effect on 1 January 1986 .
described in the Annex to that Decision ;
                                                                        Done at Brussels, 10 December 1985 .
Whereas the actual needs regarding the Community's
contribution to new projects falling below the threshold
referred to in the third indent of Article 6 (2) of the                                                  For the Council
abovementioned Decision have been carefully ana­
lysed, w ith the result that a certain range of flexibility is                                             The President
required ,                                                                                                  F. BODEN
 { )  OJ No L 67 , 9 . 3 . 1984, p. 54.
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 / 2                 Official Journal of the European Communities                               31 . 12 . 85
                                                      ANNEX
                                   ESPRIT 1986 WORKPROGRAMME
                                                   CONTENTS
             0. INTRODUCTION                                                                          3
             1. SUBPROGRAMME 1 : ADVANCED MICROELECTRONICS                                            8
                R & D AREAS       1.1 . Submicron MOS                                                 9
                                  1.2 . Submicron Bipolar                                           10
                                  1.3 . Computer Aided Design ( CAD)                                12
                                  1.4. Compound Semiconductor Integrated Circuits                   15
                                  1.5 . Optoelectronics                                             17
                                  1.6 . Advanced Display Technologies                               19
                                  1.7 . General Supporting Topics                                   19
             2. SUBPROGRAMME 2 : SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY                                                23
                R & D AREAS      2.1 . Theories , Methods and Tools                                 23
                                 2.2 . Management and Industrial Aspects                            28
                                 2.3 . Common Environment                                           29
                                 2.4 . Evaluation and Demonstration Projects                        31
             3. SUBPROGRAMME 3 : ADVANCED INFORMATION PROCESSING                                    32
                R & D AREAS      3.1 . Knowledge Engineering                                        32
                                 3.2 . Advanced Signal Processing, including Man-Machine Interfaces 35
                                 3.3 . Information and Knowledge Storage                            38
                                 3.4 . Computer Architectures                                       39
                                 3.5 . Design and Systems Aspects                                   41
                                 3.6 . Focussing Projects                                           42
             4. SUBPROGRAMME 4 : OFFICE SYSTEMS                                                     42
                R & D AREAS       4.1 . Office System Science and Human Factors                     44
                                  4.2 . Advanced Workstations and Human-Machine Interfaces          46
                                  4.3 . Communication Systems                                       51
                                  4.4 . Advanced Multi-Media Storage and Retrieval Systems
                                  4.5 . Integrated Office Information Systems                        55
             5. SUBPROGRAMME 5 : COMPUTER INTEGRATED MANUFACTURE                                    56
                R & D AREAS       5.1 . Integrated Systems Architectures                            56
                                  5.2 . Computer Aided Design & Engineering (CAD/CAE)               57
                                  5.3 . Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM )                         59
                                  5.4. Flexible Manufacturing Systems                               60
                                  5.5 . Subsystems and Components                                   62
                                  5.6 . CIM Systems Applications                                    63
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                              Official Journal of the European Communities                                No L 365 / 3
                                                          INTRODUCTION
                  This section is an integral part of the ESPRIT 1986 Workprogramme and is necessary for its
                                                        proper interpretation.
0 1.  BACKGROUND                                                                 to relate ESPRIT to technological            pro­
                                                                                 grammes outside the Community.
      The European Economic Community has
      launched the European Strategic Programme of
      Research and Development in Information Tech­
      nology ( ESPRIT). The ESPRIT Programme is
                                                                      0.3 . LAYOUT
      intended to promote precompetitive and generic
      research and development in information technol­
      ogy through collaborative projects within the                         After the introductory section , the document is set
      European Community which the Community shall                          out in five main sections corresponding to the
      finance in part . A management plan , the annual                      major technical subprogrammes of ESPRIT.
      workprogramme , has been established within
      ESPRIT to enhance the control and accountability
                                                                            The partitioning of ESPRIT R & D into five sub­
      of the programme . Updated by the Commission in
                                                                            programmes is largely dictated by the need to be
      consultation with the ESPRIT Management Com­
                                                                            able to manage the task for the Community . In
      mittee, each year, the document is submitted to the
                                                                            practice , the technical subprogrammes are interre­
      Council for approval .
                                                                            lated and the Workprogramme indicates the signi­
                                                                            ficant interdependencies that exist .
      This is the third such workprogramme and it cov­
      ers the period 1986-1990.
                                                                            Each subprogramme is split into a number of
                                                                            R & D areas and these are further subdivided into
                                                                            R & D topics and projects .
0.2 . PURPOSE
                                                                            Each R & D topic is discussed in detail , indicating
                                                                            the anticipated continuation of work from pre­
      The purposes of the ESPRIT 1986 Workpro­                              vious years ( in this case 1983 and 1984), and the
      gramme are :                                                          work anticipated to start in 1985 .
      — to serve as a guideline to potential proposers
            by indicating the intended scope of the total
            ESPRIT workprogramme ;
                                                                      0.4.  THE ESPRIT APPROACH
      — to describe project areas and their interrela­                      The approach of ESPRIT is to create the technol­
            tionships, and include descriptions of current                  ogical basis which enables the Community to seize,
            work commenced as a result of Calls for Pro­                    the opportunities associated with new information
            posals in 1984 and 1985 ;                                       technology ( IT), to foster cooperation and to pave
                                                                            the way to standards of European origin .
      — to provide a framework for assessment and                           ESPRIT is the Community programme which is
            review of projects under way , in order to                      specifically designed for R & D where collabora­
            appraise their progress individually and in                     tion at the Community level is purposeful and
            relationship with each other ;                                  which is pre-competitive . Collaboration is in order
                                                                            to achieve critical mass efforts, or to bring together
                                                                            the necessary expertise otherwise scattered in the
                                                                            Community, or to create the potential to enlarge
      — to act as a reference document for considera­                       markets . In addition by providing the framework
             tions relating to coordinating activities under                for concurrent technical approaches ESPRIT
             ESPRIT and under other Community and                           involves collaboration between companies and
             national programmes, and to serve as a basis                   between companies and universities .
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 / 4                        Official Journal of the European Communities                               31 . 12.85
    ESPRIT's precompetition requirement is for areas               industrial aspects to put these into the business
   where market opportunities can be seized within                 and industrial context, a common integrated soft­
   5-10 years , and in doing so ESPRIT stands                      ware engineering environment and the demon­
   between basic research, and applied industrial                  stration of the effectiveness of new software prod­
   research and development work. The former is not                uction methods .
   normally determined by industrial priorities and
   the latter responds to specific short term needs .
   In the selection and definition of IT areas that
   ESPRIT should address, two considerations have                  SUBPROGRAMME 3 — ADVANCED
   been important :                                                INFORMATION PROCESSING
   ( i)  to have sufficient       command      of   basic          This subprogramme is seeking means for improv­
         technologies ;                                            ing the performance and efficiency of computing
                                                                   systems by making use of advances in four key
   (ii) to have systems capabilities which are adapt­              areas, namely, knowledge engineering, including
         able to changing market needs thereby per­                the development of knowledge acquisition , repre­
         mitting the knowledge of markets to have                  sentation and manipulation techniques ; external
         further influence on technology development .             interfaces, dealing with the recognition , under­
                                                                   standing and synthesis of signals ; information and
                                                                   knowledge storage, these advances are the develop­
    Five areas or subprogrammes are of strategic                   ments in data and knowledge bases as well as the
   importance to the Community .                                   techniques of access to these bases , and deals with
                                                                   architectural characteristics and physical proper­
                                                                   ties of advanced storage devices ; computer archi­
                                                                   tecture, i.e. the development of new computer
                                                                   architectures and their associated programming
    SUBPROGRAMME I — ADVANCED                                      environments where particular emphasis will be
    MICROELECTRONICS                                               placed on the use of concurrency.
    Advanced Microelectronics in the context of this
    subprogramme encompasses all research and
    development aspects concerning the provision of
    the physical elements for the acquisition, process­             SUBPROGRAMME 4 — OFFICE SYSTEMS
    ing, storage, transmission and display of data
    required by modern informatics products . It is
    thus the hardware foundation of the information                The challenges facing office systems development
                                                                    include understanding and supporting the tasks of
    technology industry .
                                                                    office workers and not simply providing a technol­
                                                                    ogical update of traditional office functions,
    This subprogramme concentrates on the priority
                                                                    achieving improvements in man-system interfaces
                                                                    that allow productive use of office systems by a
    areas needed to ensure that Europe maintains a
                                                                    wide range of office workers, and the development
    competitive position regarding the supply of these
    essential ingredients for her IT manufacturing
                                                                    of system oriented approaches to office problems .
    industry with the required capability, in sufficient
    quantity and at competitive prices .                            The subprogramme has been divided into five
                                                                    areas :
                                                                    Office system science and human factors
                                                                    Advanced workstations
     SUBPROGRAMME 2 — SOFTWARE                                      Communication systems
      TECHNOLOGY
                                                                    Advanced filing and retrieval systems
     The Software Technology subprogramme aims at                    Integrated office systems .
     making available, at Community level, efficient
     and cost-effective methods for the industrial prod­
     uction of high-quality software, and is intended to
     lead to more rapid introduction of new products
     and a reduction of life-cycle costs in software .
                                                                     SUBPROGRAMME 5 — COMPUTER
                                                                     INTEGRATED MANUFACTURE
     Work in the subprogramme addresses theories ,
     methods and tools to put software production on a               The two main objectives of the CIM subpro­
     sound engineering basis, project management and                 gramme are : one, the creation , in the Community,
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                            Ofticial Journal of the European Communities                                 No L 365 / 5
      of an environment in which multi-vendor auto­                      towards standardisation will be guided by the gen­
      mated manufacturing systems can be implemented                     eral IT standardisation policy established and not
      with the resulting integrated system having mini­                  duplicate any of the existing organisations or
      mum functional overlaps and maximum connec­                        actions .
      tivity, and two , to support individual work on
      selected subsystems, interfaces and tools whose
      development or refinement is seen to be of stra­                   The dissemination of results of and information
      tegic value to Community industry, and whose                       acquisition for ESPRIT is an important element of
      design aims are consistent with the general archi­                 ESPRIT. Its goals are the quick application of
      tect ure of the environment .                                      research results from ESPRIT in Community
                                                                         industry and to provide the best basis for the plan­
                                                                         ning and management of the programme , and for
      Work in the subprogramme relates to the total                      project participants. For this purpose ; both
      requirements of manufacturing activities , from the                classical mechanisms like publications ; workshops
      planning and design stage to real-time control of                  or conferences and newer communication meth­
      production . It then includes computer-aided                       ods through electronic means, for instance the
      design (CAD), computer-aided engineering                           IES, are used.
      (CAE ), computer-aided manufacturing (CAM ),
      flexible machining and assembly systems,
      robotics , testing and quality control .
                                                                   0.6 . TELECOMMUNICATIONS
                                                                         When the ESPRIT plans were originally drawn up,
0 5.   PROGRAMME EXECUTION AND
                                                                         it was recognised that telecommunications formed
       INf RASTRUCTURE
                                                                         an important part of information technology.
                                                                          However, the subject was not included at that
                                                                          time .
       The Commission manages and monitors the exe­
       cution of the programme .
                                                                          In September 1983 , the Commission prepared a
                                                                          communication to Council , demonstrating the
       It also is responsible for the infrastructure needed               increasing economic importance of telecommuni­
      for programme execution . Part of this infrastruc­                  cations for the economic development of the­
      ture is the information exchange system ( IES).                     Community, and proposing six action lines in this
      Another part is the dissemination of results and                    field .
      reports and the acquisition of information . A third
      part     is concerned with the interrelationship
      between the       R&D    work   and    standardization             The second line of action calls for cooperative R &
      activities .                                                        D and worksharing at the pre-competitive stage.
                                                                          In 1984, the Commission initiated a Planning
                                                                          Exercise in Telecommunications ( PET) in con­
       The ESPRIT Information Exchange System ( IES)                     junction with major European companies and the
       serves as a management tool . The IES is an                        national PTT laboratories . The aim was to assess
       IT-based data communications system for the                       the advantages that might stem from a Community
       exchange of information between separated parti­                  approach for identifying the technological
       cipants in ESPRIT projects, their own manage­                     development needs which have to be satisfied to
       ments and policy making bodies, and the Com­                       make available in the Community the capacity of
       munity and national administrations involved in                   establishing integrated broadband communication
       programme or project management .                                  ( IBC ) in 1995 and onwards .
       In the IES area there are development projects for                 As a result of this planning exercise, the Commis­
       instance developing OSI conformant software for                    sion has submitted to the Council a proposal in
       the interconnection of computing systems and                       two parts :
       development facilities , service projects providing
                                                                          —       Definition of an IBC reference model, which
       e.g. computer based mail and conferencing facili­
       ties , and support projects studying key issues such                       will be used to identify precisely the sub­
       as security .                                                              sequent action of an envisaged R&D pro­
                                                                                  gramme in Telecommunications , aiming at
                                                                                  enabling the realization of the IBC ;
       A number of the research and development pro­                      —       A set of technology assessment activities,
      jects in ESPRIT will lay the scientific and tech­                           primarily to support the development of the
       nical foundations on which standardization activi­                         reference model .
       ties will be based later. Conversely, some demon­
       strations of the interworking of standards may
       require additional work ; this work will be consid­                The Council has approved this proposal in July
       ered as part of the infrastructure . The work                       1985 and the Definition Phase of a programme for
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 / 6                              Official Journal of the European Communities                                31 . 12 . 85
       ' Research     in  Advanced     Communications        in            sals was published in September 1985 to improve
       Europe ( RACE)' is now in the launching phase                       the coverage of the workprogramme.
       and will draw on the results of the relevant
       ESPRIT projects ; proper coordination between
      the two programmes will be assured .
                                                                           For participation in the IES development and ser­
                                                                           vices, a call for proposals was published on
                                                                            14 July 1984 and has produced 25 responses which
                                                                           have been evaluated, and several contracts were
                                                                           let .
0.7 . TYPES OF PROJECT
      In the ESPRIT 1986 Workprogramme , a distinc­
                                                                     0.9 . WORKPROGRAMME COVERAGE AND
      tion is drawn between Type A and Type B pro­                         INTERPRETATION
      jects.
      These are defined as follows :
                                                                           The 1986 Workprogramme covers the period
                                                                            1986-1990 . This is sufficiently long to cover the
      Type A Projects are projects that are described in                   duration of the longer projects . However, informa­
      the workprogramme, with specified objectives .                       tion technology is rapidly evolving and therefore
      They usually require large resources, both human                     the R & D objectives may well have to be modified
      and financial , and considerable infrastructure with                 in the course of yearly revisions .
      clear and constant perspectives .
                                                                            In the 1986 Workprogramme, less detail is
      Type B projects are covered by 'research themes '                     included on intermediate objectives compared
      which are indicative but do not form an exhaus­                      with 1985 , since many of them are embedded in
      tive listing . They usually require smaller resources                the ongoing projects .
      but nevertheless are as amenable to milestone
      management and review cycles as the larger pro­                      Such intermediate objectives were given in pre­
      jects .                                                              vious versions of the workprogramme to provide
                                                                           the framework and reference for evaluation, pro­
                                                                           per management, and further refinements . They
                                                                           were an estimate of how the overall objectives of
                                                                           the project may be achieved and they were indica­
0.8 . CURRENT STATE OF THE PROGRAMME
                                                                           tors and checks against which concrete proposals
                                                                           for projects were examined . Intermediate
                                                                           objectives shall , however, not be regarded as
      This workprogramme describes work in progress                        legally mandatory in the sense that proposals hav­
       as a result of the 1984 call for proposals or about                 ing perfectly acceptable end objectives should not
       to start as a result of the 1985 call for proposals .               have to be rejected only because they may have
       The steps leading to this work were as follows :                    been designed to rest on different intermediate
                                                                           objectives than the ones proposed here .
      An advance notice for participation in the main
       ESPRIT Programme was published on 30 Decem­                          Within each of the separate subject areas of
      ber 1983 . The Council of Ministers approved the                      ESPRIT there exist programmes of work which
      programme for an initial period of five years on                      may depend on skills, techniques or technologies
      28 February, 1984 . The 1984 Workprogramme was                        which are being developed within one or more of
      published in the Official Journal of the European                     the other subject areas .
      Communities .
                                                                            To aid the presentation, the descriptions of current
       A first call for proposals for the main programme                    work are typographically distinguished in bold
       was issued on 21 March 1984. Nearly 450 propo­                       face . These descriptions are located under the
       sals were received in response and were evaluated                     most appropriate heading, but it should be realized
       during May and June 1984. A shortlist was                            that in some cases projects formulated in response
       selected in July 1984 for detailed negotiations and                  to previous workprogrammes overlap the subject
        final approval . In addition , much of the work car­                boundaries currently used.
       ried   out    under  the   earlier   Pilot   Phase  was
        combined with the main programme .
                                                                            In the 1986 Workprogramme, project descriptions
                                                                            for proposals received in 1983 / 84 have been
       A second call for proposals led to a similar sequ­                   updated compared with the description in work­
       ence of events in 1985 , with 400 responses being                    programme 1985 . The updates cover changes
       received , evaluated and a shortlist for negotiations                between proposals for work and finally negotiated
       agreed in July 85 . To strengthen the Software                       contracts . Also, results of on-going work are
       Technology effort, a supplementary call for propo­                   reported where appropriate .
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                               Official Journal of the European Communities                                     No L 365 / 7
      The best information on the 1985 projects avail­                          or for work allocated to projects that have termi­
      able at the time of writing (October 1985 ) has been                      nated prematurely, provided the topic continues to
      incorporated in the 1986 Workprogramme . How­                             have priority for the attainment of the ESPRIT
      ever, it should be noted that at the time this work­                      goals . It is intended that the projects retained after
      programme was drafted the Commission had not                              these calls should strengthen particularly the coh­
      yet concluded final negotations on all this work                          erence of the work in ESPRIT and bring it closer
      and some modifications may prove necessary in                             to reaching the strategic objectives .
      some cases .
                                                                                Such call(s) will be focussed and involve smaller
      The 1986 workprogramme, shows that, while the
      technical areas selected for the first phase of                           resources than the larger calls for proposals made
      ESPRIT have been covered to a significant extent,                         in previous years . Only a selection of the areas
      some important areas still remain . They are identi­                      mentioned in this workprogramme as potentially
                                                                                suitable will be included in such calls .
      fied in the workprogramme, chapter by chapter,
      under the subheading 'Scope for further work '.
                                                                                Intending proposers should therefore await the
      Call(s) for proposals to be published in 1986 will                        publication of the more detailed call(s). They will
      be either for a selection of work still not covered .                     specify the necessary information .
               0.10 . RESOURCES BREAKDOWN
                      The breakdown of the overall ESPRIT resources between the subprogrammes is subject
                      to modification in the light of further technological evolution in the world . In parti­
                      cular, in the light of the industry response to calls for proposals, it must be possible to
                      transfer resources between the various subprogrammes — after all the partitioning of
                      ESPRIT into five areas is a management convenience and is not intrinsic to the nature
                      of the work .
                      The resulting approximate distribution of Community contribution to the five technical
                      areas ( in MECU) allocated so far for support of projects assuming that they run to their
                      planned completion , is as follows :
                                                              Year of call for proposals
                                  Subprogramme                                                     Total      Percentage of
                                                                                                                  total
                                                              1983 / 84            1985
                      1.  Microelectronics                       85.5              76.5            162.0           24.2
                      2.  Software technology                    72.9              56.6            129.5           19.3
                      3.  AIP                                    89.8              65.0            154.8           23.0
                      4.  Office system                          82.6               54.6           137.2           20.5
                      5.  C1M                                    45.2              41.2             86.4           13.0
                                                    Total       376.0             293.9            669.9          100.0
                      These allocations show some changes compared to the previous periods due to earlier
                      work being resubmitted subsequently in modified form under a later year's call .
                       They have the status of planning figures and are derived on the basis of the actual set of
                       projects currently under way or under negotiation . They will need to be updated as
                       changes are reported in the project and contract status of the technical areas . However
                       the intention is to maintain the approximate distribution between the five areas .
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 /8                             Official Journal of the European Communities                                    31 . 12 . 85
                    Notes :
                   ( 1 ) The figures for 1983 / 1984 combine the contributions to 1983 Pilot Projects and to
                         projects started as a result of the first call for proposals on the main programme in
                         1984 .
                   (2 ) The figures for 1985 are target figures and may need adjustment in the light of final
                         contract negotiations .
                   (3 ) The Software Technology figure for 1985 includes an allowance to cover the sup­
                         plementary call for proposals .
                   (4) The figures exclude any expenditure on management and infrastructure .
                                                      SUBPROGRAM ME 1 :
                                            ADVANCED MICROELECTRONICS
1 .0 . Introduction                                                   design complexity effectively is the main goal of Com­
                                                                      puter Aided Design (CAD) of VLSI Systems, the sub­
Advanced Microelectronics in the context of this sub­                 ject of area 1.3 . Five new A projects are currently under
programme, encompasses all research and development                   negotiation in this area.
aspects concerning the provision of the physical ele­
ments for the acquisition , processing, storage, transmis­
sion and display of data required by modern informat­
                                                                      Area 1.5 is concerned with the possibilities afforded by
ics products ; it is thus the hardware foundation of the              optoelectronics devices especially in the data transmis­
Information Technology industry.                                      sion field. The ongoing A project in this area will be
                                                                      updated and improved by new concepts as a result of 2
This subprogramme concentrates on the priority areas                  proposals in the 1985 call . A new B project is also cur­
needed to ensure that Europe maintains a competitive                  rently under negotiation .
position regarding the supply of these essential ingre­
dients for her IT manufacturing industry with the
required capability, in sufficient quantity and at com­
petitive prices .                                                      Advanced display technologies is the subject of area
                                                                       1.6 . This offers the possibility of replacing the ubiqui­
                                                                       tous CRT, as the main vehicle for large scale display,
                                                                       by more compact solid state based counterparts. One
                                                                       new B project is currently under negotiation .
Overview of the subprogramme areas
The major thrust of the research and development pro­
grammes within Microelectronics is to push the silicon                Areas 1.8 and 1.9 of the previous (85) workplan have
                                                                      been subsumed into a new area 1.7 . Here research
based technologies of MOS and Bipolar towards their
limits of capabilities (areas 1.1 and 1.2) whilst pursuing            themes are brought together which are more innovative
the possibilities afforded by the compound semicon­                   or longer term than those contained in the topic areas 1
ductor materials, such as Gallium Arsenide (area 1.4),                to 6 as well as critical areas of technology and tech­
which have potential capabilities in key areas beyond                 niques with a common trunk . Topics here include
those possible using silicon . In areas 1.1 and 1.2 , four            packaging, device modelling and special processing
new B projects are under negotiation , two in each area .             materials and techniques .
In area 1.4, one new A project and two new B projects
are under negotiation .
                                                                       Computer control of manufacturing VLSI is also
Apart from a capability to produce high function count                 needed to support the technology programmes . Here
chips , it is also necessary to deal with the problems                reduction in feature size and layer thickness places
posed by the complexity of their design . Managing this                increasing demands on process control where the final
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                             Official Journal of the European Communities                              No L 365 /9
device parameters are dependent on a large number of                1.1.2.   Current projects and projects under negotiation
variables. The minimization of human handling and an
attack on the sources of yield limiting contamination                  SOI Materials and Processing towards 3D Integration '
are critical in this situation . For a given level of con­
tamination , yield falls rapidly as feature size is reduced .
                                                                    Proj. Ref 245 : A /84
These problems could be addressed by appropriate
type B projects in this area .                                      The aim of this cooperative research is to study and
                                                                    develop new silicon technologies necessary for three
                                                                    dimensional integration . This 3D approach will offer the
                                                                    possibility of higher density integration , higher speed of
The above is also an example of where cross-subpro­                 operation and multifunctional signal processing. Three
gramme cooperation could be of great value . Coopera­               main technological steps will be explored :
tion with CIM projects addressing similar problems
should be encouraged .                                              a) the growth of SOI active layers having electronic
                                                                         properties needed for the realization of high quality
                                                                         devices and circuits
7 new projects are currently being negotiated in area
 1.7 .                                                              b)   the stacking of two active levels in a way that avoids
                                                                         any degradation of already built devices
                                                                    c)   the single level SOI processing for the fabrication of
                                                                         individual components and for their connection ; the
                                                                         development of a complete process incorporating two
              R & D area 1.1 : Submicron MOS                             active layers.
The requirement is to develop all the individual process
steps to achieve submicron feature size in MOS ( such
as lithography, etching and doping). The target is a pro­
cess capable of making several million components of                               'Submicron CMOS Technology '
logic and memory per chip. It is envisaged that below
about 0,7 µm tools other than optical lithography will
be used . Process and device modelling will be
included . To achieve these goals the critical techniques            Proj. Ref. 554 : A /84
common to R & D areas 1.1 and 1.2 need to be devel­
oped (see area 1.7).                                                 The project aims at developing the necessary building
                                                                    blocks for a 0.5 µm CMOS process, primarily dedicated
                                                                    to the production of high speed digital circuits. In order
                                                                    to allow the programme to proceed with the best chances
                                                                    of success, two main phases have been identified and
                                                                    organised: the first refers to an intermediate step at the
 1.1.1 .   Objectives :                                              1.0 µm level; the second to the final 0.5 jum CMOS
                                                                    family. At the end of the project, the IC companies of the
The main objectives of the broad 5-year programme                   consortium will have, in their pilot lines, the building
are :
                                                                    blocks of a CMOS process capable of realising IC 's with
                                                                     0.5 um features.
— at 18 months : design and evaluation of test vehicle
       of more than 1 000 transistors based on 1 µm
       design rules with a pitch (metal plus spacing ) of 3          Two workpackages of Project 554 above are likely to be
       µm .                                                         expanded by the addition of thefollowing two projects :
 — at 3 years : first samples of demonstration circuit
       with 0,5 million transistors , 1 ^m design rules, with
       data on figure of merit and delay time .
 — at 4 years : statistical data on homogeneity on a                       'Submicron Contact Technology and Reliability '
       slice and yield for 1 µm design rules ; and test
       vehicle with more than 1 000 transistors with 0,7
       µm design rules and a pitch of 2 µm .                         Proj. Ref. 810 : B/85
 — at 5 years : first samples of circuits with more than 1           The work aims at developing suitable contact technolo­
       000 000 transistors, 0,7 µm design rules, with data           gies compatible with CMOS and bipolar circuit fabrica­
       on figure of merit and delay time.                            tion with one micron or submicron design rules.
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 / 10                            Official Journal of the European Communities                                   31 . 12 . 85
lite contact properties are being investigated and life             IG and epi process should eventually match to have
tests under various stresses, using extensive failure ana­          intrinsically-gettered, low leakage epiwafers for
lysis , are being carried out, to assess quantitatively, the        submicron CMOS devices insensitive to soft errors.
contact performance and reliability.
               'Refractory Metal Gate Transistor '                  1.1.3 .    Scope for further work
                                                                    This area is well covered by projects retained and is
Proj. Ref. 1125 : B/85                                              unlikely to be considered for inclusion in call(s) for
                                                                    proposals to be published in 1986.
The work deals with the use of tungsten as gate material :
sputtering or chemical vapour deposition will be investi­
gated and compared; different gates structures such as
pure W, W on polysilicon or other pad layers will be                              R & D Area 1.2 : Submicron bipolar
studied. Emphasis will be put on W-oxide — Si devices
characterization and reliability. However, process                   The overall objective is to develop specific bipolar sub­
changes required for W usage will also be addressed and              micron process steps, leading to a complete processing
set up on a submicronic demonstrator circuit .                       sequence for very high performance ICs .
                                                                     To realize this objective the following developments
          'Physical-chemical Characterization of Silicon             are included in the project area :
    Oxynitrides in Relation to their Electronic Properties '
                                                                     — overall circuit concepts which must evolve together
                                                                           with the technology ;
 Proj. Ref 369 : B/84
                                                                     — a vertical device structure appropriate to submicron
                                                                           lithography ;
 The aim of the project is firstly to establish the relation
 between the physico-chemical and the electrical properties          — a          convenient      multilayer      interconnection
 of silicon oxynitride film and secondly the relation                      technology ;
 between the physico-chemical properties and the growth
 parameters. This research will be carried out in view of            — a suitable contact and multilayer interconnection
 the likely applications of silicon oxynitrides in IC technol­             technology ;
 ogy , for instance in MNOS based non-volatile memories
 and in submicron MOS devices .                                      — appropriate high dissipation , high pin count,
                                                                           electrically matched leads, packages ;
                                                                     — process and device modelling.
            'Substrates for CMOS VLSI Technology '
                                                                     Critical techniques needed to support areas 1.1 and 1.2
                                                                     are covered in area 1.7 .
 Proj. Ref 509 : B/ 84
 Part 1 : To set up an intrinsic gettering (IG ) process for
  wafers with medium high oxygen concentration . The pro­             1.2.1 .   Objectives :
 cess should be independent of the type, p or n , of the sub­
 strate and should be able to produce :                               The main objectives of the programme over 5 years are :
 — a highly defective bulk region                                    — at 1 year : initial process design ; evaluation and
 — a defect-free denuded zone                                                           choice of critical equipment .
                                                                      — at 2 years : establish final design rules at 1 um .
 A thickness of this zone around 1-10 um is identified as
  an optimum compromise for several factors (leakage cur­             — at 3 years : demonstrate 1 um 10/ 20K gates, 100 ps
  rent , insensitivity to latch up and soft error).                                     gate delay circuits .
                                                                      — at 4 years : establish final design rules for 0,7 um
  Part 2 : To characterise epi wafers with diameter 4 and 6                              structures .
  inches. The thickness of the epilayer should be in the
  range 5-10 um , both for p + and n + substrates . This              — at 5 years : Availability of first samples of 20/ 50K
  thickness range is suitable for submicron CMOS . Finally ,                             gate circuits in 0,7 um process .
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                             Official Journal of the European Communities                               No L 365 / 11
1 .2.2.     Current projects and projects under negotiation          times ofless than 100 ps and the integration of 50K gates
                                                                     in an area of about 100 mm2. Therefore it is necessary to
                                                                     reduce the structure dimensions to less than 1 /um to
               'Submicron Bipolar Technology — /'                    develop a suitable transistor structure and a multilayer
                                                                     metallization up to five layers. The feasibility of IC 's with
Pro). Ref. 243: A/84                                                 the indicated integration level by means of this process
                                                                     will be demonstrated at the end of the project by an ade­
                                                                     quate test vehicle (demonstration chip).
 The overall objective of this programme is to develop spe­
cific bipolar submicron process steps leading to complete
processing sequences for the manufacture of very high
performance integrated circuits. A common test mask                  Previously the state of technology development will be
and common test procedures have already been defined                demonstrated at appropriate stages by 2 more demon­
and agreed between the partners in order to provide suit­           stration chips. The first demonstration chip will be a
able environment and comparison basis for effective col­             ECL-Gate Array with about 1 OK gates . It is character­
laborative work. Two main milestones are defined in the              ized by the followingfeatures :
programme of work :
a) end of 1987, intermediate 1 um process ; demonstra­
                                                                     A self aligning emitter-base structure with poly-Si-emitter
      tion of a gate delay of about 100 pS at a complexity
                                                                     and -base will be used for the transistor. Performance
      of JO to 20K gates.
                                                                     advantages result from a reduction of the transistor area
h) end of 1989, submicron process ;                                  due to self aligning processing, from polySi-emitter and
      demonstration of a gate delay less than 100 pS at a           from lower base resistance. Typical delay and speed
      complexity greater than 20K gates .                           power product is 200 ps and 0,7 pJ, respectively. Three
                                                                     layers of metallization are provided for wiring and power
                                                                     distribution using an organic/inorganic sandwich for the
 Two workpackages ofproject No. 243 above are likely to              isolation layer. The metal pitch will be 6 um in the first
he expanded by thefollowing two projects :                           layer (without vias). The chip area will be about 150 mm 2
                                                                     and the power consumption will be typically 23 W. The
           ' Very High Performance Bipolar Structure '              planned packaging is based on a TAB process with a cap­
                                                                     ton film in the standard 35 mm size.
Proj. Ref 1018 : B/85
                                                                     At the time being, most of the activities carried out within
 The aim of the work is to develop and optimize processing           the scope of the project concentrate on process develop­
schemes for a sidewall base contact structure as a com­              ment for realizing the first demonstration chip. An exact
plement to the submicron bipolar structures developed in             definition of the second demonstration chip will be
  Submicron bipolar Technology — /'.                                provided at the end of the second year of development
                                                                     work .
   High Performance Polymersfor Multilayer Interconnec­
                         tion Insulation '
                                                                        'A High Performance CMOS Bipolar Processfor VLSI
 Proj. Ref. 1025 : B 85                                                                         Circuits '
 The work concerns the research and development of high
 performance polymers for intermetallic insulation layer              Proj. Ref. 412 : A /84
 with or without photocrosslinking potentiality. These high
performance polymers would be polyimide based resins
 and would exhibit                                                    This project aims at the development of a VLSI technol­
                                                                      ogy which combines, on a single chip, MOS circuitry of
 a)    High thermal and chemical resistance :
                                                                      the highest density presently obtainable, with bipolar
 b) High mechanical and dielectric properties together                circuitry of similar density, but better suited to specific
       with suitable etching resistance.                              tasks, in particular, the interfacing with external equip­
                                                                      ment. In the project the main effort will fall on the tech­
                                                                      nological side : development of methods which allow both
                Submicron Bipolar Technology — II '                   bipolar and MOS transistors to be made in compatible
                                                                      process steps, and this down to dimensions comparable to
                                                                      those presently obtained in MOS-only technology . In
 Proj. Ref. 281 : A /84                                               parallel with this technological work design methods have
                                                                      to be developedfor the specific type of circuitry envisaged,
  The projectfocusses on the development of a bipolar tech­           along with a study to determine, for various types of
 nology for high speed data and signal processing prod­               application , the most appropriate division of subsystems
 ucts. This technology will allow the realization of delay            between the two circuit technologies.
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 / 12                          Official Journal of the European Communities                                   31 . 12 . 85
1 . 2.3 .  Scope for further work                                         jects concerned with the development of new VLSI
                                                                          processes (see areas 1.1,1.2 and 1.7); however com­
This area is well covered by projects retained and is                     patibility with CAD is required .
unlikely to be considered for inclusion in call(s) for
proposals to be published in 1986 .                               (d) Care should be taken to promote cooperative
                                                                          development between universities, industrial
                                                                          groups and research institutions in order to transfer
                                                                          know-how and make CAD available to a broader
                                                                          community.
                     R&D area 1.3 .: CAD                          (e) Care will be taken to interface with, support and
                                                                          employ the results of other ESPRIT activities.
1,3.1 .     Objectives
                                                                  (0 the application of knowledge engineering tech­
The two primary objectives are :                                           niques to CAD should be emphasised.
(a ) to develop advanced CAD techniques to manage                 (g) dedicated CAD hardware should be incorporated
       the ever increasing circuit complexities within                     where appropriate.
       microelectronics ;
                                                                  (h ) there is a vital need to incorporate the results of
(b ) to provide a capability for complex VLSI design                       current European projects which are in most cases
       which is widely accessible to the EEC IT com­                       difficult to quantify.
       munity.
The overall aim is to develop within a common frame­
work an integrated set of portable tools capable of
handling VLSI circuits containing up to several
million components . This set of tools should :
                                                                   1 . 3.2 .   Current projects and projects under negotiation
— provide a fast response, user friendly design facility
       that is readily adaptable to changes in technology ;
                                                                        'High Level CADfor Inter-active Layout and Design '
— - allow designers to achieve a rapid turnaround of
       valid and testable designs and associated test infor­
       mation ;
                                                                   Proj. Ref 10: A/83
— - provide facilities for reliability and performance
       optimization of circuits ;
                                                                   Following the completion of the pilot phase work has
— include methodologies of cell-based design and                   commenced on the main phase oj the high level CAD pro­
       libraries of adaptable building blocks ;                   ject. The main topics under investigation include high
                                                                   level design methodology based on Petri nets, hierarchic
— assimilate relevant results of CAD projects under               floorplanning with a high degree of automation, ana­
       Regulation ( EEC ) 3744/ 81 .                               logue and general cell design , data modelling and data
                                                                   base management.
                                                                   An introductory manual on high level design has been
                                                                   issued and contains most of the partners, ideas on the
                                                                   application of Petri nets to the design of concurrent
Strategy                                                           systems. This will be updated at periods of about six
                                                                   months.
( a) A positive attempt should be made to encourage
       the emergence of an overall CAD infrastructure
        such that the majority of tools developed under            A review of placement algorithms has been made and
        existing programmes together with future tools can         proposals were made for the development of a hierarchic
        be combined to provide an integrated widely acces­        floorplanner. Automation will be provided by means of
        sible tool capability.                                      constructive placement and simulated annealing algo­
                                                                    rithms. The activities on the task of cell building have
 ( b) As far as possible, complex demonstrator chips will           achieved as a first result, a design system for computer­
        be used as a focus for each stage of the programme .        aided nominal design of cells to be used within VLSI cir­
                                                                    cuits . A new design method has been established for the
 ( c) Device and process modelling is not considered as             task of designing integrated circuits at transistor level.
        part of the CAD projects but is included in the pro­        Future work will concentrate more on the development of
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                             Official Journal of the European Communities                              No L 365 / 13
the appropriate software tools and their integration                 of SAILPLANE (a new limit cycle analysis tool) and the
around a common data base.                                          final version of CANDI (coefficient optimization tool) will
                                                                     be delivered. The results of a design exercise for type (d)
   'Advanced Algorithms, Architecture and Layout Tech­               architectures will be compiled. To support silicon integra­
    niquesfor VLSI Dedicated Signal Processing Chips '               tion of type (b) and type (d) archtectures the alpha-ver­
                                                                     sions of a data-path compiler and a controller compiler
                                                                     will be delivered. Further progress on version V.II of the
Proj. Ref. 97: A /83                                                 standard placement and routing tool CALMP will be
                                                                     made.
 The main goal of this project is to develop CAD systems
for designing custom integrated signal processing chips                      'High Yield High Reliability Ultra-large Scale
based on four different target architecture types                           Integration System Through Reconfigurability '
(a) hardwired bit-serial,
                                                                    Proj. Ref 244 : B/84
(b) hardwired bit-parallel.
(c) sys tolic arrays and
                                                                     Project 244 aims to produce ultra large scale integrated
(d) customized bus-oriented multiprocessors.                         circuits of one million transistors with a standard 2 um
                                                                     CMOS technology, by using defect tolerant architecture,
 For each architecture type, industrial design experience is         configured at the end of the manufacturing cycle. Redun­
accumulated through the actual design of integrated                  dancy introduces new constraints on the design, for inst­
circuits . From this experience a general methodology is             ance, each of the elemental blocks of the design must be
derived, which specifies                                             easily testable and repairable, whilst the increase in area
                                                                     of the silicon should not exceed 30 0/o. Specific CAD tools
(1) how a given digital signal processing algorithm can              have to be developed to allow the efficient use of defect
      be implemented with the target architecture,                   tolerant architectures. The tools should help with such
                                                                     topics as : yield estimation , test strategy and testability,
(2) how the architecture can be integrated in Silicon               floor planning, sizing and pin count, redundancy, lan­
      using a pre-defined circuit cell library. Once a design       guage for circuit representation andformal verification .
      methodology has been defined,         specifications are
      derived for CAD tools to perform various design                 Improvement of Yield and Performance of ICs by Design
      tasks . The major effort is then invested to develop                                      Centering '
      these tools and design the circuit cells .
                                                                     Proj. Ref. 456 : B/84
 The CAD tool AMAI. proving the feasibility of the above
approach , was developed. It fits together with CAD tools
developed on the pilot phase to form a complete design              During the first 6 months of the project, work has been
system for hardwired bit-serial architectures. This design          done on the following tasks :
system , can completely automate the design of complex
                                                                     1.   Development        of  a    yield   and   performance
integrated circuit digital filters with a design time of less
                                                                          optimization program .
that a week. This CAD system has been successfully
applied to the design of a PCM-FDM Transmultiplexer                 2.    Study of pre- and postprocessors for the schematic
with a complexity of 35 000 transistors.                                  input of circuits.
                                                                     3.   Improvement of transistor models.
In order to set up design methodologies for the other
three architecture types (b)-(d) mentioned above, another            4.   Determination of parameter deviations and correla­
milestone has been the successful organization of 5 tech­                 tions .
nical workshops at various partner sites. These workshops
have helped to further stimulate the partner interaction
 which had already started in the pilot phase. Active work­
                                                                     During that period the partners have achieved the jollow­
groups have been formed with technical personnel from                ing results :
different partner sites , which are carrying out joint
research activities.                                                 1.   Development of interfaces to transfer the data of the
                                                                          approximation and design centering programs to the
                                                                          program SPICE.
 In the work forecasted to be ready by the time the work­
plan is published, the milestones which will be reached               2.   Linking of the approximation and design centering
 are summarized here .
                                                                          programs to the modified network analysis program .
                                                                     3.    Investigation of the schematic input of circuits (SDS
 Design methodologies for architecture types (b) and (d)                  and PCAD).
 will be developed. The beta-version of the filter synthesis
program FALCON will be delivered. The alpha-version                  4.    Development of a new MOS transistor model.
 ---pagebreak---   No L 365 / 14                          Official Journal of the European Communities                                 31 . 12 . 85
 5.   Investigation of parameter deviations and correla­            fore be widely acceptable to developers of present and
      tions in the production of Bipolar and MOS ICs.               future CAD systems.
  During the following 6 months the project will have car                 'Advanced Integrated Circuit Design Aids (A IDA )'
 ried out the following tasks :
                                                                     Proj. Ref 888: A /85
  1.  Improvement of the link between design centering
      and network analysis programs .
                                                                    AIDA intends to explore the application of modern pro­
 2.   Development of an interpreter for the calculation of          gramming techniques and knowledge base engineering to
      circuit characteristics .
                                                                    CAD tool development. It will constitute a design
                                                                    assistant that proposes solutions rather than record and
 3.   Definition of a preprocessor for schematic input of            validate the designer 's ideas. This allows the designer to
      circuits in the optimization program .                        apply his creativity where it is most efficient leading to
                                                                    improved design quality.
 4.   Establishment of computer controlled parameter
      measuring systems.
                                                                     Research and development work will be done, applying
 5.   Reduction of CPU time for the calculation of the new          modern programming techniques (e.g. those developed
      MOS transistor model equations.                               for expert systems) to VLSI-CAD tools . The potential
                                                                    contribution of these techniques is twofold:
                                                                     1.    The basic techniques may be used to make new tools,
                 CVS (CAD for VLSI Systems)'                               much more efficient than classical ones.
                                                                     2.    The basic integrated circuit design knowledge may be
 Proj. Ref 802 : A /85
                                                                           recorded into the machine, and used by "expert "
                                                                           modules, under the control of a system designer.
 The aim of the CVS project is to implement an integrated
 CAD system capable of coping with the needs of the                 A IDA project intend to explore these two domains, to
 1990s, when the improvements of the semiconductor tech­
                                                                     develop experimental tools using these techniques, and to
 nology will consent to produce chips of about 1 million             experiment on real industrial cases to demonstrate the
 transistor complexity. Such a CAD system must lead to a             benefit they could give.
factor 10 improvement in design time, based on novel
 tools for architecture synthesis connected with parame­
 trized digital/analogue cell implementations techniques.             'Cooperative Development ofan Integrated, Hierarchical
 C VS draws heavily on results from the existing projects                and Multiview VLSI-Design System with Distributed
 CVT (Microelectronics Programme 3744/81 , MR-04­                                   Management on Workstations '
 CVT) and SPECTRE (ESPRIT Project No 554)
                                                                    Proj. Ref 991 : A /85
          'European CAD Integration Project (ECIP)'
                                                                     This project aims at the development of a complete, inte­
 Proj. Ref. 887: A /85
                                                                    grated, open and cost effective design system on a large
                                                                     variety of intelligent workstations. The work is an exten­
 Complementary project with 1058                                    sion of project MR-09-DFT under the Microelectronics
                                                                     Programme 3744/81 and focusses on functional data
  ECIP addresses the area of data exchange and infra­               models, distributed datamanagements, verification of
                                                                    submicron structures , advanced multilevel simulation as
 structure standards with the objective of defining and
 promoting standards within the European IT industry.                well as self-testing/fault tolerant synthesis techniques.
  The ability to readily interchange data and CAD tools
                                                                     Commercial exploitation is envisaged.
  between companies seems a key area for bringing into
 practical reality many of the benefits of collaborative tool           'Knowledge Based Design Assistantfor Modular VLSI
  development in Europe and for making available the                                            Design '
  results of ESPRIT to the wider European IT community.
  Effective liaison between the ECIP project and all other
  ESPRIT CAD projects will be established ensuring trans­            Proj. Ref. 1058: A /85
 fer of experience in both directions . In particular, the pro­      Complementary project with 887
 ject 1058 which develops advanced tools will be comple­
  mentary to the ECIP project. In this way it will be
  ensured that the standards developed in ECIP are based             The goal of the project is the development of an interac­
  on a wide experience of requirements and should there­             tive knowledge based system for verification of electrical,
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                             Official Journal of the European Communities                                No L 365 / 15
functional and timing correctness offlexible VLSI mod­              in materials preparation , ion — implantation, and IC
ules as generated by silicon compilers . The system is              process technologies .
highly interactive during the module design phase.
 During the call of a module by the floorplanning pro­
gram , the system is driven by a rule based expert system
of which both an engineering workstation version as well             1 .4. 1 .   Objectives
as an advanced LISP machine based version will be
developed. A verification speed of 20 000 transistors/hr
on a workstation is projected. The system also automati­             The specific objectives of this programme are :
cally calls a novel waveform relaxation switch-circuit level
simulator implemented on a multiprocessor hardware                  — at 1 year : demonstrate feasibility of MESFET
 accelerator. This will lead to 1 00... 300 times SPICE per­                 based circuits with 1000 gates and gate delay (tpd )
formance and will allow for efficient and accurate simu­                     of less than 100 ps . Also, demonstrate basic HJBT
 lation of up to 4000 transistor circuits. Moreover, a new                   and /or HEMT circuits (other than ring oscillators).
 interactive mode, based on the waveform analysis tech­
 nique, will allow for 'real time ' user interaction supported       — at 2 years : demonstrate at least IK memory (less
 by an advanced multiwindow user interface. The adapta­                      than 1 ns access time, less than 500 mW dissipa­
 tion of a register-transfer-functional switch level simula­                 tion ) and /or equivalent complexity circuits .
 tor to the hardware accelerator will be investigated. A                     Demonstrate feasibility of 100 gates HEMT and /or
 knowledge based extractor will provide a link to sym­                       HJBT circuits .
 bolic/procedural module layout generators .
                                                                     — at 3 years : evaluate yield on a demonstrator circuit
                                                                             of IK or equivalent complexity, on at least 10
                                                                             wafers . Demonstrate feasibility of IK HEMT
 As a complementary project to 887 (ECIP), it will ensure                    memory and /or comparable HJBT circuit . Com­
 that the standards promoted by ECIP will keep future                        parison of various technologies ( if possible with
 developments in CAD for VLSI possible.                                      the same circuit for each technology). Decision for
                                                                             selecting one out of them .
                                                                      — at 4 years : demonstrate 16K memory (or equiva­
                                                                              lent) in the selected technology.
  1 .3.3 . Scope for further work                                     — at 5 years : Demonstrate large circuit of 10 to 20K
                                                                             gates complexity, gate delay of less than 50 ps with
 This area is well covered by projects retained and is                       figure of merit less than 100 femtojoules . This
 unlikely to be considered for inclusion in call(s ) for                     demonstrator could be a 16K memory with an
                                                                             access time in the order of few nanoseconds or it
 proposals to be published in 1986.
                                                                             could be defined during year 3 to fulfil needs of
                                                                              other ESPRIT areas (specially high speed data bus)
                                                                              or of telecommunication industry (signal process­
                                                                              ing circuits for instance).
  R & D area 1.4 : Compound semiconductor integrated cir­
                             cuits
  Integrated digital circuits in III-V compound semicon­              1 .4.2 .    Current projects and projects under negotiation
 ductor materials offer potential speed and /or speed
 power product advantages over silicon circuits because
  of higher electron mobility. The technology complexity                 'Compound Semiconductor Materials and Integrated
  of these materials is some years behind silicon and con­                                       Circuits — /'
  siderable materials and process research are necessary .
  Because of the increasing market for high-speed , low­
  power circuits, many problems need to be tackled in                 Proj. Ref. 232 : A /84
  order to bring forward knowledge in this area .
                                                                       The overall objective of this programme is to establish
                                                                      gallium arsenide digital integrated circuit technologies
  The technology encompasses GaAs circuits based on                    using the GaAs MESFET, high electron mobility transis­
  Field Effect Transistors ( FET's) as well as GaAs /                  tors (HEMT/ TEGFET) and heterojunction bipolar tran­
  GaAlAs heterojunction structures using high electron                sistors (HBT) as the active circuit elements . These circuits
  mobility transistors ( HEMT) or the heterojunction                   will be configured to enable the speed and power advan­
  bipolar transistors ( HJBTs). Basic research is required             tages of GaAs over silicon to be suitably demonstrated.
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 / 16                           Official Journal of the European Communities                                   31 . 12 . 85
   Compound Semiconductor Materials and Integrated                  integrated circuit (MBTs) process technology and asso­
                        Circuits — II '                             ciate expertise.
Proj. Ref 522.: A /84                                               The two bipolar logics that will be developed consist of
                                                                    emitter coupled logic (ECL) and integrated injection logic
 The general objective of the research programme is to              (I2L). Single heterojunction (wide gap emitterj — MBTs,
develop advanced aspects of GaAs digital integrated                and double heterojunction (wide gap emitter and collec­
circuit process technology and associated expertise to              tor) — DHBTs will be investigated and compared. At the
enable the fabrication of fast, high performance digital           same time, efficient analytic switching models for these
circuits. Whole IC fabrication is not considered to be             devices will be developed. A combination of numerical
pre-competitive. Demonstrator digital ICs will be devel­           simulation and experimental verification will be used to
oped to evaluate the performance of the various logic cir­         ensure the velidity of the analytic models for discrete
cuit technologies .                                                devices. The first two years will be spent on the develop­
                                                                   ment of high performance transistors (3 um emitter width
                                                                    HBTs with an JT exceeding 17 GHz) with good yield and
 The following project is the result of a rearrangement of          uniformity on 2' diameter substrates. Simple integrated
the two preceding ongoing contracts No 232 and 522.                 circuits like divide by 2 and divide by 4 circuits, will be
with some improvements required to meet the objectives             fabricated for operation with high input frequency
of the workplan                                                     (exceeding 4 GHz). One of the exciting tasks will be the
                                                                    realization of non-alloyed ohmic contacts, which with the
                                                                   programme on metallic-alloys, such as plasma deposited
      'Compound Semi-Conductor Integrated Circuits '                 W-Si, enables the realization of advanced integrated cir­
                                                                    cuits . In this respect, the state of the semiconductor sur­
 Proj. Ref. 843 : A /85                                            face chemistry is recognized to be an importantfactor.
 This project is a collaborative programme involving six            During the two following years , simple front-end signal
 major European companies from three countries in an                processing test circuits (3 bit Adder for instance) will be
 attempt to establish high speed GaAs VLSI circuits in the         fabricated to determine applicability of HBTs for a fast 8
 commercial market . The availability of state of the art           bit processor.
 circuits will serve European system and equipment manu­
facturers in the IT industry and help to provide them with
 the necessary worldwide competitive edge.                           In the later stage of the project high speed demonstrator
                                                                     circuits will be developed such as digital analog converters
                                                                     or signal processing circuits .
 The programme will investigate in detail two active dev­
 ices which are potential candidates for LSI/ VLSI inte­
gration , namely MESFETs and HEMT. They are
presently in different stages of maturity, but many key                    CAD Methodsfor Analog GaAs Monolithic ICs '
 technologies are common , such as ion — implantation ,
 advanced lithography (e-beam and DSW), dry processing
 and self-alignment techniques. They will be investigated            Proj. Ref 255: B/84
 in parallel in all their aspects, from device modelling to
fabrication yield, by the participating members in close
 collaboration so rapid advances can be made with limited            The major emphasis of the research programme is the
 resources .
                                                                    development of a full CAD library of theoretical models
                                                                     and experimental data for passive elements and active
                                                                    components required for the design of GaAs analog ICs.
 During the five years of this programme, various key                The work starts by deriving physical models and equiva­
 demonstrators of increasing complexity, such as counter,            lent circuits for different types of MESFET and passive
 multiplexers, multipliers , A to Ds , SRAMs and gate                elements both for lumped and distributed approaches.
 arrays will be produced. They will provide the necessary            The next step is the CAD of groups ofpassive and active
feedback to design and technology and will help to steer            devices for the integrated implementation of elementary
 the programme towards its VLSI goal.                              functions. Here besides circuit analysis, coupling between
                                                                     adjacent elements and thermal distribution will also be
                                                                    simulated. In the successive phase, analog ICs defined as
                                                                     high level functional blocks have to be considered with
       ' Technology of GaAs-GaAlAs Bipolar Integrated
                            Circuits '                               special analysis programs. This final CAD program
                                                                     includes package effect evaluation and error sensitivity
                                                                     analysis . Interactive optimization will be organized in a
 Proj. Ref 971 : A /85                                               user-oriented, transferable package. The project starts
                                                                     with C and X band investigation to be extended to 18
                                                                     GHz. The CAD capability will be proven with different
  The general objective of the research programme is to              GaAs IC demonstrators, including submicron dimension
 develop advanced aspects of GaAs/GaAlAs bipolar                     devices .
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12. 85                             Official Journal of the European Communities                              No L 365 / 17
           'Large Diameter Semi- Insulating GaAs '                 ble with Ill-V integrated circuits providing a fast electr­
                                                                   ical interface . This programme is not aimed at optics-­
                                                                   based computers but rather at providing components
Proj. Ref 1128 : B/85                                              and subsystems for large bit rate transmissions.
                                                                    Remark : The achievement of the objectives of this pro­
GaAs Integrated Circuits are using an n-type active layer          gramme needs very large resources which may not be
prepared by ion implantation of donors directly in semi-­          available within the framework of ESPRIT. On the
insulating wafers, followed by an annealing to cure the            other hand these objectives represent a minimum target
implantation damages. In order to realize LSI circuits ,           to remain competitive .
one must control the properties of each individual micro-­
FET needed in this case and this can only be achieved if
the active layer of each of them is perfectly under control.
                                                                    1.5.1 .   Objectives
This project is aimed at developing an industrial
approach for the preparation of large diameter (2")                a)     Integrated electronic and optical components on the
semi-insulating GaAs substrates which can allow to pre­                   same chip :
pare very homogeneous active layers by ion implantation             — at 1 year : demonstrate a monolithic photodetec­
and thus to control the properties of each individual                                  tor with internal amplification .
micro- FET made on it .
                                                                   — at 2 years : demonstrate a monolithically inte­
                                                                                       grated receiver with bandwidth greater
                                                                                       than or equal to 2.5 GHz.
Three different goals have to be reached :
                                                                   — at 3 years : demonstrate an integrated transmitter
                                                                                       with a bandwidth greater than 2.5
1.     Determine ways to define material homogeneity for                               GHz.
       ingots of diameter 2" and larger. This will be done bv
       correlation between results of measurements made
       on bulk material and on processed wafers cut from it.        After year 3 , further optimizations of receiver, transmit­
                                                                    ter, and perhaps also repeaters have to take into
                                                                    account the progress and needs of the telecommunica­
2.     Investigate possible ways to improve cristalline             tions industry and of the other ESPRIT areas.
       quality by using two parallel and complementary
       approaches, and end up with either a choice between
       the two techniques or a mixture ofboth .                    b)      Wavelength multiplexing ( WDM) with integrated
                                                                          optics :
 3.    Grow larger (2" ) ingots of suitable quality using the             at 1 year :  demonstrate of DFB laser with thres­
       recipes worked out in goals No 1 and 2.                                         hold   current   lower  than    50  mA ;
                                                                                       demonstration of waveguide fed pho­
                                                                                       todetector ; low loss monolithic wave­
                                                                                       guide ( smaller than ldB/cm).
                                                                          at 2 years : demonstrate of 2.5 GHz bandwidth
                                                                                       modulators in semiconductors .
 1 .4.3 .  Scope for further work
                                                                          at 3 years : demonstrate an integrated transmitter
 This area is well covered by projects retained and is                                 with a bandwidth greater than 2.5
 unlikely to be considered for inclusion in call(s ) for                               GHz.
 proposals to be published in 19B6.                                       at 4 years : demonstrate integrated WDM trans­
                                                                                       mitter and receiver modules .
                                                                    At this point, some inputs from other ESPRIT areas
                                                                    and telecommunications industry are needed to imple­
                                                                     ment a demonstration link at a several gigabit rate .
                R & D Area 1.5 : Optoelectronics
 Optoelectronic devices will be increasingly required for
 telecom s transmission, intra- and extra- computer con­             1 .5.2.  Current projects and projects under negotiation
 nections , ultra wide band image processing and switch­
 ing. Future generations of mono-mode communica­
 tions systems may use coherent detection and multi­                               InP Based Optoelectronic circuits '
 channel wavelength multiplexing and may be phase
 modulated . This will provide improved performance                  Proj. Ref 263 : A/84
 and be compatible with integrated optical logic. It will
 allow processing, combining and routing at very high                The general objective of the research programme is to sig­
 speeds. In semiconductor form it will also be compati­             nificantly increase the data rate in information
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 / 18                           Official Journal of the European Communities                                  31 . 12. 85
transmission systems, by the use of high performance                to chip interfaces and for the incorporation of optical
devices and with a variety of multiplexing techniques ,            fibres into printed circuit boards.
mainly with the use of different wavelengths . In the first
three years, activity will be focussed on achieving and
utilizing single mode discrete functions suitable for sub­         The next project is a continuation of the preceding
sequent hybrid and monolithic integration . Full hybrid             on-going project No 380.
integration will be worked on in year three and four. The
work on these materials will be oriented towards reprodu­
cible growth of high quality, high homogeneity, large                  'Optical Interconnectfor VLSI and High Bit Rate ICs '
area heterostructures suitable for lasers with low thres­
hold current density and well controlled wavelength , for
photodetectors with low residual doping level and for                Proj. Ref. 986 : B 85
waveguides with low losses .
                                                                    The inherent wide bandwith and crosstalk immunity of
                                                                    optical transmission media permit very high bit rate sig­
 The second part of this programme is aimed at the                  nals to be readily distributed overcoming the transmission
development of the tehnology needed for the fabrication             line and rf-interference problems encountered with very
of the electronic devices in a form which can be integrated         high bit rate ICs. Many lower bit rate signals, each of
with the optical devices . A range of devices will be investi­      which would conventionally employ a package pin , can be
gated and compared for use in a range offunctions. As a             time multiplexed together to form one easily transmitted,
result of the importance of longer wavelength operation             high bit rate optical signal which leaves the package via
all the work will be on InP-based semiconductor com­
                                                                    one optical pin so avoiding very high pin count packages
pounds. A very important potential benefit of the pro­             for VLSI chips.
gramme is that the materials to be studied are expected
 to have very high performance in conventional electronic
 circuits . Thus the programme may lead to improve elec­             The following work packages form the proposed pro­
 tronic functions as well as sophisticated opto-electronic
                                                                    gramme :
 circuits .
                                                                     Design , manufacture and evaluate functional optical
                                                                     interconnect demonstrator working at up to 1 GBs - ' and
                                                                     demonstrating pin count reduction for VLSI chip. Inves­
 In addition to this programme, one work package is to be
                                                                     tigation of optical interconnect up to 5 GBs - '. Optimise
 added to investigate the possibility offabricating an inte­
 grated optic source with independent control of both out­          physical aspects of optical interconnections . Undertake
put power and wavelength using electro optic effect and              extended applications study.
 current injection to tune distributed feedback (DFB) grat­
 ings lasers.
                                                                              'Molecular Engineeringfor Optoelectronics '
                                                                      Proj. Ref. 443 : B/84
    'Optical Interconnectfor VLSI and High Bit Rate ICs '
                                                                      The aim of the project is the development of new organic
  Proj. Ref. 380 : B/84                                              electro-optic and nonlinear optical materials . There is an
                                                                      increasing requirement for such materials in the rapidly
                                                                      expanding fields of integrated optics and optical com­
                                                                      munications. The target of the project is to produce novel
  This speculative research programme is undertaken to .              materials for the fabrication of devices utilising linear
 investigate the application of optical interconnection to            electro-optical effects, second-order frequency mixing
  reduce the package pin count and electro magnetic inter­            effects and third-order effects.
ference in VLSI and high speed integrated circuits and in
 sub-assemblies containing these components . The current
  one year study to investigate in detail the role and capa­              Basic Technological Studies for GainAs MISFETs'
  bility of interconnection got underway in early 1985.
  Early work has included design studies of the perform­
  ance, cost and implementations of optical sources and
  detectors and choice of optical fibre for optical intercon­         Proj. Ref. 927: B/85
  nect. The limitations of optical interconnect have been
  assessed in terms of power budgets , bit rates, and tech­
  nological compatibility and the application of the technol­         In 0.53Ga0.47As epitaxially grown on semi-insulating
  ogy is currently being studied considering communication            InP substrates is a promising material for high speed log­
 protocols, IC performance boundaries and the impact on               ical devices as well as integrated micro-optoelectronic cir­
 processor architectures . Some experimental work has                 cuits for 1.3 um applications. Insulated gate field effect
  commenced on investigating low cost techniques for fibre            transistors (MISFETs' ) can be realized on this material.
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 , 85                           Official Journal of the European Communities                              No L 365 / 19
This programme has three aims :                                   polycrystal-line silicon , deposited in a high power glow
— first, to obtain a better understanding of the basic            discharge process . Furthermore elementary Thin Film
      phenomena at the insulator/InGaAs interface,                 Transistor ( TFT) circuits suitable for bus driver shift
                                                                  registers will be developed and investigated and Driver
— second, to explore the possibilities of ion implanta­           prototypes of short length shall be combined with
      tion ,                                                      LC-matrix display and tested.
— third, to evaluate the influence of the InP substrate
      quality.
                                                                     Large Area Complex Liguid Crystal Displays Addressed
                                                                                 by Thin Film Silicon Transistors '
Once these three aspects have been explored, technologi­
cal processes for high speed logic devices and integrated
optoelectronics will be optimized.
                                                                  Proj. Ref. 833 : B/85
                                                                  LCDs dominate the portable displays market. Thin-film
                                                                  transistor addressing of LCDs would allow an increase in
1.5.3 .    Scope for further work                                 display size and complexity to levels adequate for word
                                                                  processor and graphics displays. The aim of the present
This area is well covered by projects retained and is             project is to investigate a viable technology for the fabri­
unlikely to be considered for inclusion in call(s) for            cation of large area (A5 to A4) complex (up to 1000
proposals to be published in 1986 .                               addressable lines) LCDs based on polycrystalline and
                                                                  amorphous silicon transistor active matrices. Thin-film
                                                                  silicon devices show promise ofhigher yield and reliability
                                                                   than other approaches . Extensive investigation of the fol­
                                                                  lowing areas is planned: optimisation of transistor char­
       R & D area 1.6 : Advanced Display Technologies             acteristics . yield, and stability over large areas : special
                                                                   high throughput, large area semiconductor processing
                                                                   equipment : special LCDs fabrication techniques ; colour
 1.6.1 .   Objectives                                              systems : interactive displays : human factors.
 In many product areas , eg workstations , electronic off­
ice equipment etc. there is an urgent need in Europe for
new advanced display systems to replace and
supercede the conventional CRT. Such displays would
need to be of large size ( A4 and above ) and of medium            1 .6.3 .  Scope for further work
to high definition . Colour capability would also be
desirable / necessary .                                            Further work in this area is dependent on the outcome
                                                                  of the technology definition efforts described in 1.6.2 .
 Many approaches are currently being investigated . A
technology definition effort in which major existing
                                                                   This area is well covered by projects retained and is
community practitioners would combine their know­                  unlikely to be considered for inclusion in call(s) for
ledge and experience is required to define within a
                                                                   proposals to be published in 1986.
short time period the most adequate way to tackle this
problems .
                                                                             R & D area 1.7 : General Supporting Topics
 1 .6.2 .  Current projects and projects under negotiation
                                                                    1.7.1 .   Topics
   'Materials and Technologies for High Mobility TFTsfor
                                                                   This area covers :
                    LC Display Bus Drivers '
                                                                   — research themes not already identified in the
 Proj. Ref. 491 : B/84                                                   microelectronics areas 1.1 to 1 .6
                                                                   — topics which support one or more of the areas 1.1
 In current practice, the peripheral driver circuits for active          to 1.6
 matrix liquid crystal displays consist of external IC-chips.      — research themes which look forward beyond the
  This project proposes to develop thin film materials and                early stages of the microelectronics programme
 technologies for column- and line-bus drivers to replace                 towards the submicron goals .
 the external IC-chips . The main task will be to develop a
 low temperature deposition process for the semiconductor
 thin film material compatible with the glass substrates            Since this is very wide-ranging in its scope, no specific
 used for the LC-display. The main material suggested is            programme of work is set out. Instead, on-going pro
 ---pagebreak---  No L 365 /20                             Official Journal of the European Communities                                  31 . 12 . 85
jects are briefly described (in numerical order) and                  methodology, possibly based on expert systems to define
indications given of other candidate topics.                          the diagnostic strategy, new hardware circuitry to enh­
                                                                      ance the EBT performance. The areas of computer con­
                                                                      trol of the electron beam system, interfacing to CAD sof­
                                                                      tware, identification of circuit elements, methodology for
1 . i .2 . Current projects and projects under negotiation           design error diagnosis, test pattern generation for elec­
                                                                      tron beam debugging, design for electron beam testabil­
               'Advanced Interconnect for VLSI '                     ity, and delectron beam equipment development, will be
                                                                     addressed in order to achieve this overall objective.
Proj. Ref 14 : B 83
                                                                                    'Assessment ofSilicon MBE Layers '
The overall objective of this programme is to develop high
density interconnect compatible with one micron MOS                   Proj. Ref 305 : B/84
and Bipolar VLSI technologies . This interconnect tech­
nology will feature four levels of low resistivity metal
interconnect with high electromigration resistance and                This project is divided into three parts :
stable, low resistance contacts to the underlying silicon
circuit .
                                                                     1.    Growth of silicon layers by molecular beam epitaxy
                                                                           (MBE).
 The Pilot Phase of the project has demonstrated good                2.    Continuing in situ measurement ofprocess character­
                                                                           istics .
progress and cooperation between the partners. A com­
mon process, common test mask and common test meth­
ods have been established in order to provide a practical            3.    Implementing and developing techniques for the
environmentfor cooperative research .                                      characterisation of MBE layers. This information
                                                                           will then be used to optimise growth conditions.
In 1985 this core process has continued to be used with
yield improving and the first milestone has been                     It is planned that four specific developmental tasks be
achieved: it has been decided to continue with polyimide             undertaken on four specific techniques. The remainder of
as dielectric for the core process.                                  the programme will be concerned with the application of
                                                                     existing techniques and the interpretation of the totality
                                                                     of the results so obtained.
The following milestones of the programme are :
Sept. 1985           — Specification for Test Reticle for 5            'Plasma Deposition Technologyfor Magnetic Recording
                         jum and below.                                                     Thin Film Media '
                          Demonstration of metal dry etch
                          capability adequatefor 5 jum pitch         Proj. Ref 334 : B/84
Dec. 1985            —    Test Reticle available
Sept. 1986           — Select Optimum Process                        It is expected that in near future recording media and
                                                                     heads prepared by thin film technology will compete the
                          Demonstration of 3-Layer Metal             conventional particulate media and conventional heads.
                          at 5 /um pitch                             Both longitudinal and vertical recording in thin films
Dec. 1986            — Yield and Reliability data on
                                                                     promise a significant increase of information density. In
                                                                     this project, appropriate deposition technologies will be
                          Optimum Process
                                                                     studied which provide high deposition rates to produce
Sept. 1987           — Demonstration of 4-Layer Metal                such films in a industrial scale. This includes magnetron
                          at 3 um pitch .                            sputtering, electron beam evaporation and plasma en­
                                                                     hanced metal-organic chemical vapor deposition .
       Automatic Design Validation of Integrated Circuits
                        Using E-beam '                                     Silicon-on-insulator Systems Combined with Low
                                                                                              Temperature '
Proj. Ref. 271 : B/84
                                                                     Proj. Ref. 370: B/84
 The project seeks to develop a methodology for the auto­
matic design errors diagnosis of VLSI devices based on
the observability facility given by an electron beam sys­            In the project a number of techniques will be used and
tem , connection to the CAD environment, pattern recog­              combined in order to obtain good quality single crystal
nition to automatically position the E-beam , global                 layers with thicknesses varying between 0.5 um and 50
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 85                                Official Journal of the European Communities                                No L 365 / 21
jim for a variety of applications . These relate to both             micron technology both in silicon and JII/ V semiconduc­
silicon-on-insulator (SOI) and to SOS (silicon-on-sap ­              tor systems. However, much remains to be done to under­
phire) for high performance integrated circuits, and also            stand the complex chemistry and physics involved by
for the provision ofalternatives to the currently used cum­          applying suitable diagnostic methods. Until this is accom­
bersome dielectric isolation (DI) processing.                        plished the full potential of plasma etching will not be
                                                                     realized. The overall programme is necessarily interactive
                                                                     and brings together centres of expertise in plasma chemis­
          'Dopant Profilingfor Submicron Structures '                try and physics, instrument manufacturers and a supplier
                                                                     of chemicals to the electronics industry. Collectively they
                                                                     possess a unique combination of knowledge and facilities
Proj. Ref. 519: B/84                                                 which will assure success in this broadly based
                                                                     programme.
 The aim of this project is to realize the capabilities for the
accurate determination ofshallow dopant profiles as used
in submicron devices. To achieve this the development of                                * Wafer Scale Integration '
one electrical technique, i.e. spreading resistance, is pro­
posed together with an intercomparison of this technique
with two other non-electrical methods , i.e. Secondary Ion            Proj. Ref. 824 : B/85
Mass Spectrometry (SIMS) and Rutherford Back Scat­
tering (RBS). The primary emphasis of the project will be
put on the development and use of the spreading resist­               The design and demonstration of a 25 million transistors
ance technique with the other techniques being used pri­             system on a single chip is to be performed by connecting
marily for comparison. A major by-product of this                    the good cells of a wafer. The demonstrator chosen is a 4
approach will be the data enabling a better understand­              Mbit static RAM in a 1.4 fim CMOS technology using
ing of diffusion kinetics to be obtained. In addition the            redundancy at the intracell and intercell levels, in order
work will concentrate on profiling Boron Phosphorus,                 to tolerate end of manufacturing defects. Special interest
Arsenic and Antimony and will also involve the use of                will be given to test facilities and test strategy both at the
and assessment of novel annealing methods such as strip              cell and whole wafer levels. After test, reconfiguration
heater andflashlamp annealing.                                       techniques will be used to avoidfaulty elements in the cell
                                                                     and to further increase cell yield. Decoding logic and
 'Investigation ofall aspects ofthe Interconnection of High          externally controlled switches will be used to configure
                                                                     the good cells on the wafer.
                Pin Count Integrated Circuits '
 Proj. Ref. 544 : B/83-84                                            Software will be produced to provide automatic selection
                                                                     of the switches to be programmed to give the necessary
 This project has the following aims :                               interconnect. The yield of alumuniutn interconnection
                                                                     lines will be increased by repair of short or open . A study
 1.    The development of alternative methods of connect­            of thermal and electrical characteristics of the package
      ing the integrated circuit to its interconnect medium .        and bonding will be made and used to provide a suitable
                                                                     package for the demonstrator.
2.     The development of large area high density intercon­
      nect using multilayer polymer techniques .
                                                                            'Packagesfor High Speed Digital GaAs ICs '
3.     The development of reasonably large area ultra high
      density interconnect based upon a combination of
      thick film dielectrics and additive base metal electro­        Proj. Ref. 830: B/85
      plating methods .
 It is the aim to realize all interconnect systems with just         The various package design requirements being evolved
 two layers, thereby achieving low cost through reduced              to meet the requirements of the GaAs IC industry are
handling and inexpensive materials.                                  being addressed. The project will result in the establish­
                                                                     ment of package standards together with clearly defined
                                                                     design principles and methods offabrication .
  High Resolution Plasma Etching in Semiconductor Tech­
     nology-Fundamentals , Processing and Equipment '
                                                                      The project will lead to the establishment oj 4 package
                                                                     designs, an 8,16,24 and 40 I/O lead package having the
 Proj. Ref. 574 : B/84                                               necessary operational characteristics for mounting and
                                                                     hermetically encapsulating GaAs ICs for use in high
                                                                     speed digital applications . Extensive use will be made of
 It is widely recognised within the electronics industry that        sophisticated computer aided design and simulation
plasma etching will play a vital role in achieving sub­              modelling throughout the project , the success of which
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 / 22                           Official Journal of the European Communities                                   31 . 12.85
has already been established in the case of the 8 I/O              particular, resist and mask technologies will be devel­
lead package. Three technical approaches to package                oped, appropriate to 0,5 um resolution while compatible
construction will be investigated, the use of direct-sealing       with higher resolution limits. Hence mask technology will
techniques, glass joining fired ceramic and co-firing              utilize Si-based membranes which are appropriate for use
glass-ceramic. Associated investigational topics will              with the softer (i.e. higher-resolution) wavelengths.
include materials , metallisations, heat dissipation etc.
                                                                      'Advanced Mask and Reticle Technologyfor VLSI Sub-­
Sample packages of the various designs will be made                                 Micron Microelectronics Devices '
available for evaluation and qualification approval test­
ing. This project is complementary to project 958.
                                                                   Proj. Ref 1043 : B/85
       High Performance VLSI Packagingfor Complex
                     Electronic Systems '                           This project addresses specific areas of the maskmaking
                                                                   process to develop new equipment, materials and pro­
Proj. Ref. 958 : B '85                                             cesses and the aim is to combine such developments to
                                                                   create an enhanced mask and reticle technology to satisfy
                                                                   the wafer fabrication requirements for advanced and
This project is directed towards demonstrating the feasi­          complex devices.
bility and the evaluation of high density structure on
which VLSI chips will be connected with very dense ( 100
to 125 um pitch) TAB interconnect on a high performance                  ' Ultra Sensitive Impurity Analysisfor Structures and
                                                                                                Materials '
multichip substrate.
Electrical and thermal performance shall be measured to            Proj. Ref. 1056 : B/85
evaluate the capability of such a structure which could be
used as a basic building block of a very high performance
                                                                    This project is developing an advanced physical analysis
system (1GHz clock or 20-50 ns system cycle time).                 technique which is needed for the characterisation of
                                                                   microelectronics fabrication technologies . The technique
 This project is complementary to project No 830.                  which is based on sputtering and laser resonance ioniza­
                                                                   tion will be highly sensitive, free of matrix effects when
                                                                   multilayers are profiled and suitable to three-dimensional
    Algorithmsfor a Robust and Efficient Semiconductor             profiling with higher sensitivity as compared to standard
                          Simulator '
                                                                   Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry .
 Proj. Ref 962 : B/85
 This work is providing fully tested general algorithms for
simulating semi-conductor devices in three dimensions .             1 . 7.3 .   Scope for further work
 These algorithms would solve for the steady on-state con­
dition of a device, or for dynamic transient and small
signal conditions , and to take into account the interaction
                                                                    a)        Sub-micron processing research themes in support
 of device operation with the temperature of the crystal                      of ongoing project areas 1.1 and 1.2.
 lattice. The algorithms are to be tested in research com­
puter codes developed as a result of the project, and this          To achieve processing at feature sizes of 0.5 µm and
 code will be validated against real devices.                       below the following topics are identified :
 Since the computational demands of these algorithms are            i)        0.5 µm lithography with production throughput
 very large there will be a strong interaction between suita­                 and associated resist development which should
 ble algorithms and the availability of computers with                        be compatible with dry etching processes
 advanced architectures. A study will also be carried out
 to delimit the applicability of the assumed physical               ii )      Modelling of processes and devices including
 model, both with reference to materials and device                           experimental verification .
 dimensions .
      '0.5 Micron X-Ray Lithography Masks Resists and               b)        B-type research themes
                      Transferred Images '
                                                                    i)        In support of areas 1.1 and 1.2
 Proj. Ref. 1007: B/85                                                        — Semiconductor        processing   materials    and
                                                                                  equipments
  The objective of this work is 0,5 µm X-Ray lithography up
  to the actual demonstration of the lithography process. In                  — Photo-assisted technology
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                              Official Journal of the European Communities                             No L 365 / 23
         — High Speed on-wafer testing                                      — advanced physical analysis techniques
         — Automated manufacturing and control .                            — sensors and transducers
ii)      in support of areas 1.4 and 1.5                                    — new technologies and techniques for ad­
         — Specific C AD for III-V-integrated circuits                           vanced information storage
         —     Modelling optical elements                                   — interconnect technologies
         — reliability
iii)     Other general research themes
                                                                     In call(s) for proposals to be published in 1986, priority
         —     Lithography ( X-ray-, Ion -,)                         would be given to modelling (with the main emphasis
         —     Various active elements on high mobility              on GaAs ). to equipment related to automated manufac­
               semi-conducting materials                             turing and control, and to interconnect technologies.
                                                        SUBPROGRAMME 2 :
                                                   SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY
2.0 .     Introduction
 In 198 ? the need for a comprehensive software technol­             Review of the Software Technology sub-programme
ogy programme was justified on the basis of the high                 has identified the emphasis which needs to be given to
rate of increase in the complexity and amount of the                 the different topic areas, but it is not considered neces­
software to be generated through to the end of the cen­              sary for the 1986 workplan to significantly revise the
tury. This need is even more evident today, 2 years after            key activities which need to be supported .
the start of the ESPRIT Pilot Phase . The objectives of
the ESPRIT software technology sub-programme are
 being followed by a number of programmes across the
 world .                                                                      R & D Area 2.1 : Theories, Methods and Tools
The recognition that the key issues relate primarily to              The need to support the system development process
the development of environments , methods and tools                  with more rigorous methods and tools is a major theme
to support the design of ever more complex systems                    in the ST workplan . Measurement of productivity and
( which include hardware and software components) of                 of system quality and performance also is of great
 high quality and reliability with higher levels of prod­            importance .
 uctivity has set the major directions being taken by the
 ST programme . After 2 years of ESPRIT Phase 1 , we                  2.1.1 .  Topics
 now have underway a number of projects which are
 addressing the key issues listed above , and we are now              The topics within this area are :
 in a position to identify the areas which require streng­
 thening and indeed adding to the workplan for                        System oriented approaches :
 Software Technology .                                                 Formal methods for system development
                                                                      Hardware/software synergy
 The directions required for 1986 are identified in detail
                                                                      Requirements engineering
 in the following sections, but the need for new projects
 to promote the rapid transfer of the results of the pro­             Software security
 gramme into the industrial environment is likely to be
 the main theme for 1986. Therefore the following                      Improving current software development approaches :
 themes will be given for new work called for in call(s )
                                                                       Reusability issues
 for proposals published in 1986 :
                                                                       Formal specification
  (i)     reuse of software components
                                                                       Rigorous transformations and methods
  ( ii)   commercial security of software
  (iii ) demonstrators for evaluation of methods and                   Advanced software development approaches :
          tools in the industrial environment (see section             Methods for forma ! description and verification of con­
          2.4 .)                                                      current, distributed, embedded real-time systems
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 /24                              Official Journal of the European Communities                                  31 . 12 . 85
Systematic study of the system development process                           used in a well engineered merge for specification of
Application of A1 techniques to development                                  large distributed systems, rapid prototyping is prov­
                                                                             ided by the analysis of abstract implementations ;
Quality,         Reliability,    Conformity     Testing     and      —        Modula , Ada-like languages are considered for the
Demonstrating                                                                programming activity.
Product and development process metrics
                                                                     Semi-formal transformations of system descriptions at
                                                                     different levels are supported by validation and documen­
                                                                     tation activities.
2.1 . 2 .    Current Projects and Projects under Negotiation
                                                                     A set of tools supporting the GR4SPIN methodology is
System Oriented Approaches                                           designed on top of PCTE common tools , which makes a
                                                                     significant use ofgraphics and of concepts such as focuss­
                                                                     ing techniques, multiple windowing concepts, and simul­
            'Formal Methodsfor Asynchronous Systems '                taneous handling of different contexts.
Proj. Ref 1033 : B/85
                                                                         'Software development using concurrently executable
 1 he project aims to provide a formal framework and a                                    modules (PEA COCK)'
suitable toolset for the development of asynchronous
embedded micro and distributed systems .                              Proj. Ref 266 : B/84
7 he formalframework is based on :
                                                                      The objective of the project is the design and implementa­
          Scott 's domain-based state machine, for the mathe­         tion of a unified family of languages covering the whole
          matical model ;                                             software life-cycle. All languages will use the concept of
                                                                      'Concurrently Executable Module ', and have a common
          Hoare 's logic and temporal logic, for the correct­         signature (abstract syntax).
          ness in analysis and design .
 The toolset includes presentation language and tools such            The family includes a semi formal language for require­
as a design database, formal design provers based on                 ments capture, algebraic languages for formal specifica­
theorem proving techniques, designer 's assistants and               tion , and procedural languages for implementation .
simulators. The toolset will be linked to an asynchronous
system development environment which is currently being               The project will also provide education and training
implemented and will also be compatible with PCTE.                    material , as well as evaluation reports on field trials.
Improving current Software development approaches
                                                                                Program Development by Specification and
          Personal Workstation for Incremental Graphical                            Transformation fPROSPECTRA ) '
      Specification and Formal Implementation of Non-­
                  Sequential Systems ( GRASPIN}'                      Proj. Ref. 390: B/84
Proj. Ref. 125 : A /83
                                                                      The objectives of this project are to develop a strict meth­
                                                                     odology for program development by transformations
The project aims at a personal software development                  from formal specification .
workstation for incremental Graphical Specification and
stepwise formal Implementation of Nonsequential
systems .                                                             A wide spectrum language from formal specifications to
                                                                      Ada programs will be defined with a semantics covering
                                                                      the concurrent aspects .
 The methodological framework is characterized by an
integration of formal and informal techniques in the
development process :                                                 The transformation rules are proved correct once andfor
- -        structured analysis diagrams and entity relation­          all ', and their application , supported by software, would
           ship diagrams are usedfor requirement analysis ;           guarantee the development of programs correct in rela­
                                                                      tion to specification     The. use of Ada as a standard
           an extension of the 'initial semantics ' approach to       language, and specifications using annotations in Anna ,
           algebraic specification and high-level Petri-nets are      or an Anna-like language, will ensure portabilities
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                           Official Journal of the European Communities                             No L 365/25
between APSE 's . In order to support the use of these            Proj. Rej. 315 : A/84
tools in a workstation , a collection of additional tools
would be developed.                                               The project aims at building a complete systems devel­
                                                                  opement based on an enhanced version of the VDM
                                                                  method.
The tools will be generated according to a uniform para­
digm at each level: system development, transformation
development, Anna/Ada and control.                                The development process described by project graphs '
                                                                  will be mathematically modelled in terms of logical sys­
                                                                  tems (institutions) (e.g. equational logic, temporal logic),
         Software Environmentfor the Design of Open               their transformations, system descriptions in various logi­
               Distributed Systems (SEDOS)'                       cal systems, transformations of descriptions. Operational
                                                                  models of the project graphs will be related to the activi­
                                                                  ties of project managers, software engineers, program­
Proj. Ref. 410 : B/84                                             mers and project librarians.
The objective of the project is the definition offormal des­
cription techniques and support tools for development and         A wide spectrum language supporting specification design
implementation of OSI protocols and services and more             will be defined.    Extensions of the model-based VDM
generally, of open distributed systems .                          method, particularly for the specifications of concurrent
                                                                  systems, will be considered together with property-based
                                                                  methods and other model-based methods .
Two formal languages will be defined:      ESTELLE (based
on a state-machine model), and LOTOS which combines
the algebraic specification language ACT-ONE and the               Tools supporting the RAISE methodology will be built
CCS calculus . Both languages will be submitted to the            (first in prototype form , then in production quality form),
ISO standardization procedure.                                    several industrial applications will be undertaken , and
                                                                   training and educational material will be produced.
Prototypes of syntax-directed editors, of verification and
simulation tools will be producedfor both languages. The
project will also specify compilers and test sequence
generators .
                                                                       'Formalisms, Methods and Tools (FOR-ME-TOO)'
                                                                   Proj. Ref 283 : A/84
   'Formal Description ofArbitrary Systemss by Means of            The main goal of the project is to define,  implement and
                   Functional Languages '                          experiment a technology for the process of systematic
                                                                   development, verification and validation of software sys­
Proj. Ref. 881 : B/85                                              tems, based on the principle of reusability of software
                                                                   components .
 The project aims at developing a prototype of a general
purpose system description environment based on the                The software development process, when conceived as a
so-called 'system semantics '.                                    process with special attention given to the reuse of pre­
                                                                  fabricated components and to the structuring of the
                                                                   system to be developed into usable components as build­
 System semantics is an extension of the denotational
                                                                   ing blocks is characterized as a combination of the 'top
semantics ofprogramming languages in the sense that it
 is applicable to arbitrary systems : various properties of a      down ' and 'bottom up ' approaches .
system are described by corresponding meaning
functions.                                                         Reusability of descriptions and analysis of the sequential
                                                                  aspects of software systems is based on a specification
A prototype general purpose system description environ­           language defined by using some of the primitives of ASL :
 ment based on functional languages and extended with
                                                                  a kernel specification language with loose ' semantics.
primitives ofsystem semantics will be developed.
                                                                   Reusability of descriptions and analysis of the concurrent
Another goal of the project is the design of a prototype           aspects of software systems is based on various classes of
system description language for the following two areas :          Petri nets : from condition-event nets to high level nets
                                                                   and stochastic Petri nets .
 analog electronic circuits and digital systems (including
  VLSI)
                                                                   An environment of support tools will assist the developer
                                                                   in following a discipline for stepwise derivation and
   'Rigorous Approach to Industrial Software Engineering           development of Sw components, for retrieval of compo­
                           (RAISE)'                                nents andfor composition of Sw components.
 ---pagebreak---  No L 365 / 26                          Official Journal of the European Communities                                  31 . 12.85
 Advanced Software Development Approaches                          An evaluation report will be produced on the achievable
                                                                   performance of different functional approaches on paral­
   'An Integrated Formal Approach to Industrial Software           lel machines.
                   Development (METEOR)'
 Proj. Ref 432 : A "'84
                                                                     'An Advanced Support Environmentfor Method Driven
  The basic goal of this project is the application offormal            Development and Evolution of Packaged Software
 methods to the process of developing industrial software.                                 ( TOOL- USE/
                                                                   Proj. Ref 510 : B/84
 The development process will be studied and modelled by
individualising building components for analysing exist­
ing methods and developing new methods of software                 This project will develop techniques for the formal defini­
development .                                                      tion of methods used in the development of software. The
                                                                   project focusses on one main idea , namely that the build­
                                                                   ing of a support environment should be parameterised by
 A language for requirement engineering will be defined            methods expressed in a development language. It will
 with a semantics covering temporal aspects.                       seek to achieve understanding andformal modelling of:
                                                                   —      the software construction process
 Algebraic methods are adopted for specifying passive and          —       the application domains
 active objects (process algebras and the algebraic specifi­       —       the target systems
 cation language, ASL), denotational models of concur­
 rent systems provide a basis for defining a calculus in           and would continue with the definition , implementation
 which various properties ofsuch systems can be proved.            and evolution of a prototype environment for software
                                                                   development based on formally defined methods .
 In particular, the project aims at integrating the object- ­
based language paradigm , the algebraic approach to
software specification , the relational approach and                'Application Software Prototype Implementation System
so-calledformal heuristic.                                                                    (ASPIS f
 The impact on management and metrics of the applica­              Proj. Ref 401 : A /84
 tion offormal methods in software development will be
considered.                                                        The major aim of this project is the exploitation of state-­
                                                                   of-the-art techniques in the fields of specification lan­
                                                                   guages and artificial intelligence in order to construct
 Industrial take-up , especially in the area of constructing       tools , termed assistants , helping the partial automation
real-time distributed systems, is provided by the planned          of the first phases of the life cycle.
construction ofprototype environments .
                                                                   The main problems which will be tackled by the project
                                                                   are :
     Investigation of Performance Achievable with Highly
     Concurrent Interpretations of Functional Programs '           —      capturing the domain knowledge to be used by the
                                                                          assistant ;
 Proj. Ref 302 : B/ 84                                             —      choosing an appropriate representation formalism
                                                                          for coding knowledge
 The project investigates to use the functional approach           —      defining the basic architecture of assistants ;
for achieving thorough exploitation of the potentials of
 highly concurrent hardware architectures. This involves           —      defining an appropriate language for interaction
                                                                           between assistants and users .
 measurement of the complexity and parallelism offunc­
 tional programs written in the FP, Lispkit and Me-Too
 languages .
                                                                   The final objective of the project is the creation of a set of
                                                                   advanced methods and tools which will permit a flexible
  The project will develop :                                       approach to applications software production based on an
        a toolfor translating Lispkit and Me-Too to FP;            interactive style including mainly :
        tools to measure dynamic complexity and parallel­          — rapid prototyping by interpretation of the compo­
        ism of FP programs ;                                              nents specifications ;
        a virtual machine to simulate parallel execution of        — reusability of components through knowledge based
       functional programs.                                               assistants .
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                          Official Journal of the European Communities                              No L 365 / 27
    'Advanced Interactive Development of Data-Intensive          areas of scientific application programming, with parti­
                   Applications (AIDA )'                         cular emphasis on efficiency.
Proj. Ref 892 : B/85                                             A programming language integrating three advanced
                                                                 techniques :
The project will define and develop methodologies , lan­         — abstraction of data types and operators
guages and tools to support specification , prototyping,
design and implementation of information systems .               — relational database programming for scientific data
                                                                 — formal specification and proof
The prototype environment will allow specification in the        will be defined by taking into account the specificity of
developed System Modelling Language (SML), and pro­              scientific programming .
totyping by translation of SML to an executable combi­
nation of FLOP and NIAL.
                                                                 An efficient software development environment will
Design and implementation will use semi-automatic                 include a proof subsystem which allows the user to vali­
transformations (supported bv rule-based assistants) of          date an algorithm with respect to some specification , or
SML to TAXIS, and of TAXIS to DBPL.                               to get error information if the algorithm is invalid.
The integration of the various tools will be set on the inte­     The adequacy of the whole system will be evaluated by
gration of their underlying knowledge base.                      developing application libraries .
                                                                  Project 1041 and 1 158 are seen as complementary : pro­
                                                                 ject 1 158 should provide a demonstrator project for the
                  'Proof-oriented Systems '                      generation part of project 1041 . Both projects will
                                                                 exchange information and deliverables to avoid dupli­
                                                                 cation of work .
Proj. Ref 1041 and 1 158 : A /85
The two complementary projects have combined to
give the above named project . The two parts are :
                                                                     Development ofan Efficient Functional Programming
                                                                              system for the Support of Prototyping '
                                                                  Proj. Ref 891 : B/85
              'Syntax-directed Tool Generator '
                                                                   This project will develop a functional programming sys­
Proj. Ref 1041                                                    tem for the support ofprototyping in an efficient manner.
 The project aims at a meta-system generating syntax
directed editing, transformation and proof tools , from           Investigation and definition of capabilities and uses of a
descriptions of the syntax and semantics of the formal­          functional programming system will be carried on the fol­
isms used in software development.                                lowing areas :
                                                                  —      rapid prototyping :
 Meta-languages for the description of context conditions,        —      efficient code generation for functional programs to
 transformation rules , proof rules and tactics will he                  be processed on conventional sequential hardware :
defined.
                                                                  —      programming in the large :
 A sequence of tool generators accepting those meta-lan­          —      persistent object managementfor long term storage.
guages will be designed and release versions of the gener­
 ator system will be targeted to widely available environ­        A prototype system will be needed to demonstrate the
 ments .
                                                                  approach .
                                                                    Debugging and Specification ofAda Real Time Embed­
  'Advanced Techniques integration into Efficient Scientific                      ded Systems (DESCARTES> '
                application software (ATES)'
                                                                   Proj. Ref. 937 : B/85
  Proj. Ref 1158
                                                                   The project intends to assist developers of real-time
  This project aims to integrate advanced techniques into          embedded systems in Ada by investigating formal
 an integrated SV development environment within the               methods and bv designing software and hardware tools .
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 / 28                              Official Journal of the European Communities                                  31 . 12.85
Formal semantics and proof systems for real-time lan­                 These two topics will be considered for inclusion in
guages , with emphasis on composability will be investi­              call(s ) for proposals to be published in 1986 .
gated.
A specification language including real-time constraints
                                                                         R & D Area 2.2 : Management and Industrial Aspects
and correctness preserving transformation will be
designed.
                                                                      The theories, methods and tools developed under sub­
                                                                      area 2.1 will provide the raw material necessary for
Traceability of transformation decisions in the context of            product development, build and maintenance, and for
real-time constraints and analysis tools will be developed.           effective management of the development process
                                                                      itself, ie. development project management . The man­
                                                                      agement methods and tools required to operate on this
Quality, Reliability, Conformity testing and demonstrat­              raw data are the main subject of this part of the
ing                                                                   Software Technology Workplan .
            'Reliability and Quality of European Software             2.2.1 .   Topics
                             (REQUEST)'
                                                                      The topics within this area are :
Proj. Ref 300: A '84
                                                                      Software production and maintenance support
 The project aims at progress in quantification of software           (short term solutions including those for special
quality and reliability, thus enabling their specification ,          domains )
prediction , measurement and assurance.
                                                                       Management of advanced software production
 The areas of work include the following :                             (project      management ,      product      management,
                                                                       commercial security)
identification and validation of metrics for the 'quality '
concept, and construction of a quantitative model for its
prediction ; particular emphasis will be put on robust                 2.2.2 .  Current Projects and Projects Under Negotiation
regression methods ;
— development of metrics and models for reliability                    Software Production and Maintenance Support
        prediction , both for software systems in general and
        for domains requiring ultra-high reliability (e.g.                'Software Production and Maintenance Management
        fault-tolerant systems);                                                           Support (SPMMS)'
 —       investigation of the impact of using formal methods           Proj. Ref 282 : A /84
         on reliability prediction and demonstration ;
                                                                        The project aims at designing and implementing a system
 — definition of a methodology for the certification of                supporting all management activities in the software life
         software products .                                           cycle. One of the most important requirements of the
                                                                       system is the adaptability to different management meth­
 To facilitate the development and validation of the                   ods. The project plans to reach this objective bv building a
 metrics , the project has initiated a database for industrial         basic generic SPMMS Kernel which should be easily
data on software quality and reliability . The population              customizable, possibly using a rule based approach .
 is provided by various projects in Europe .
                                                                        Two customizations should undergo field trials, followed
                                                                       by the corresponding evaluation reports.
 2 . 1 .3 .   Scope of Further Work
                                                                       Management of Advanced Software Production
 Ongoing projects can be expected to produce a reason­
 able coverage of the theoretical basis for methods and
                                                                                 Integrated Project Management Systems '
 prototype tools to support more formal approaches to
 the design of large sequential systems and concurrent
 systems . The two very important topics of component                   Proj. Ref. 814 and 938 : A /85
 reusability (component specification, verification , vali­
 dation) and system performance and planning metrics                   The two complementary projects have combined to
 are poorly covered currently .                                        give the above named project . The two parts are :
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                           Official Journal of the European Communities                               No L 365 / 29
     'Project Integrated Management Systems (PIMS)'               2.3.1 .  Topics
Proj. Ref. 814                                                    The topics within this area are :
The project aims at developing a rule-based management            Common Tool Environment
system to be used as a consultant or as a training system .       Evolution to more advanced environments
The prototype management consultant and management                Host/target issues
instructor will be evaluated through field trials.
                                                                  2.3.2 .  Current Projects and Projects Under Negotiation
                                                                  Common Tool Environment
  'An Autonomous and Interactive Workbench to aid Soft­
                  ware Project Management '
                                                                       'A Basisfor a Portable Common Tool Environment
                                                                                              (PCTE)'
Proj. Ref. 938
 The objective of the project is the implementation of a           Proj. Ref 32 : A /83
prototype workbench with particular emphasis on plan­
ning, project control and decision support. The tools rely         The project develops a Layer of basic functionalities for a
heavily on a common knowledge base . The system is                portable common tool environment. This environment will
intended to be UNIX V and PCTE portable.                          be upwards compatible with UNIX V.
                                                                   The PCTE 'kernel ' consists of:
Projects 814 and 938 are seen as complementary : both
are concerned with the production of integrated man­              — basic mechanisms for process control, interprocess
agement tools, project 8 14 puts emphasis on the rule                   communication , as well as an Object Management
based approach, project 938 on the coupling with soft­                  System (OMS) based on an Entity- Relationship
ware development tools . Both projects will exchange                    model, and supporting the subschema concept :
information and deliverables to avoid duplication of              — user interface mechanisms providing the concepts of
work .                                                                  User Agent (supporting windows , menus and other
                                                                        bitmap facilities, and a command language) and of
                                                                        Application Agent (providing a syntax-directed editor
                                                                        and the interface to UNIX tools);
2.2.3 .    Scope for Further Work                                  — distributed facilities ( LAN interface and higher layer
                                                                        protocols ).
Previous calls for proposals have not resulted in a suffi­
cient number of good projects in this subarea.                     Two prototypes of the PCTE kernel are developed: a
However, work is in progress on simple management                  UNIX-Based version and an Ada-based one.
tools and rule-based management systems .
                                                                   Specifications have been published and are widely circu­
                                                                   lated within the ESPRIT Community.
Work is required within this subarea to provide the
methods and tools ( eg . product control , commercial
security issues) for the support of reusable software              The kernel will be evaluated by developing a few signifi­
components , to complement the work identified in                  cant tools , which include a Configuration Management
subarea 2.1 .                                                      System (CMS) and a Knowledge- Based Programmer 's
                                                                   Assistant (KBPA ).
 It is likely that small projects addressing the above top­
 ics will be considered for inclusion in call(s ) for propo­
                                                                     'Automated Supportfor Software Engineering Technol­
 sals published in 1986 .
                                                                                ogy (ASSET —feasability study)'
                                                                   Proj. Ref. 267: B/84
                                                                    The objectives of this feasability study are to demonstrate
             R & D Area 2.3 : Common Environment                   the technical feasability of a proposal to develop
                                                                   advanced interactive graphics support for a range of
 In this subarea the work on environments can cover a              methods covering each phase of the software lifecycle
 wide spectrum of topics : from integrated toolsets to             and based on the EPOS system .
 method driven system development support, from
 application oriented support systems to environment                The outcome of (his feasability study is summarized in a
 generators .                                                     final report.
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 / 30                          Official Journal of the European Communities                                  31 . 12 . 85
            PCTE- Added Common Tools ( PACT)'                     Such systematic theory of computer arithmetic aims at
                                                                  performing the basic arithmetic operations to maximum
Proj. Kef. 951 : A '85                                            accuracy and providing sufficient control over the round­
                                                                  ing process so as to ensure reliable error bounds .
 The project objective is the development and documenta­
tion ofan initial toolsetfor PCTE (Proj. 32) with focus on         Tins project will pursue different approaches : embedding
those basic tools that a potential user would expect to           of convenient arithmetic notations into ADA and Pascal;
find with a 'basic operating system '. This implementation        Al-techniques for formula transformation and symbolic
 of a layer offunctionalities above PCTE basic mechan­            manipulation ; construction of methodological framework
 isms will provide the tool developer with a higher level         and knowledge based on numerical programming.
 interface to PCTE. The project will be conducted in close
 collaboration with the PCTE project.
  The prototype version may include among others :
 —    tools for data definition and data query'                          'A Rule Based Approach to Information Systems
                                                                                           Development '
 —    tools for environment administration
 — document preparation tools                                      Proj. Ref 928.: B/85
 — communication facilities (user-user and gateways)
                                                                   The project aims to achieve information systems which
 — support for C. Pascal, Lisp and Prolog                          more accurately match the business requirements of
 — configuration management tools                                  users . Individual end user requirements are collected
                                                                   using a rule-based approach . These views are integrated
                                                                   into a single model which is subsequently used for appli­
                                                                   cation generation .
 Evolution to more advanced environments
                                                                   A prototype system will be developed consisting of:
     Generation of Interactive Programming Environments            — a rule-based fact gathering and presentation system
                            ( GIPE)'
                                                                         with different views for presentation and with valida­
                                                                         tion tools ;
  Proj. Ref. 348 : B/84
                                                                   — a unified knowledge base ( UKB) to store , aggregate
                                                                         and validate individual views ;
  The main objective of the project is to investigate the pos­
 sibilities of automatically generating interactive program­       — an application generating system to realize applica­
 ming environments from language specifications.                         tions from rule-based descriptions in the UKB, either
                                                                         bv transformation or by interpretation of the rules.
  Such an interactive environment will be generated from a
  complete syntactic and semantic characterization of the
  language to be used.
  Such syntactical and semantical characterization will be              'Concepts and Components Reuse in knowledge-rich
                                                                                           Environments '
formally expressed in a Language Definition Formalism
  (1 DF): inference rules-based approach and an algebraic
  approach are considered as the starting point for the             Proj. 974 and 1094 : A /85
  design of the LDF.
                                                                   The two complementary projects have combined to
  A prototype system will be designed and implemented,             give the above named project. The two parts are :
  consisting basically of an LDF compiler, a file system
  and a user interface .
                                                                       'A knowledge-base Environment for Software System
                                                                          Configuration reusing Components ( KNOSOS)'
     Development and integration of accurate operations in
           Numerical Data Processing (DIAMOND )'                    Proj. Ref. 974
   Proj. Ref. 1072 : B/85                                           The objective of this project is an environment supporting
                                                                    a method for components reuse during software configu­
                                                                    ration .
   The project aims at developing methods and tools allow­
   ing accurate floating point arithmetic on computers ,
   based on a mathematical theory of computer arithmetic            The user requirements for such an environment will be
   in which all operations are defined by so-called semi-­          captured through studies conducted by industries familiar
   morphisms.                                                       with large applications development.
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                         Official Journal of the European Communities                            No L 365 / 31
A KNOSOS prototype will be constructed by integration           (i )    support of wide spectrum languages and inte­
and adaptation of a relational DBMS, a knowledge                        grated mixed-mode environments (e.g. functional
representation and manipulation tool, a software confi­                 and logical programming techniques).
gurer , an automated configuration management system ,          ( ii ) development of environment generators for the
and a common user interface with graphic capabilities.                  more efficient support of advanced design meth­
This prototype will be evaluated through field trials .                 ods .
                                                                The above two topics are likely to be considered for
                                                                inclusion in call(s) for proposals to be published in
 'Support System for pragmatic reuse of software concepts        1986 .
                     ( PRACTITIONER )
Proj. Ref 1094  .                                                 R & D Area 2.4 : Evaluation and Demonstration Projects
This project aims at methods to identify, isolate, docu­        To support the urgent need for fast technology transfer
ment. store and retrieve program concepts at the design         into industry it is particularly important that the results
level, i.e. design ideas, schemes for software subsystems       of the ESPRIT programme include quantitative and
and components.                                                 qualitative assessment of the costs of introduction into
                                                                and the use of the integrated development environ­
                                                                ments, methods and tools in a controlled industrial
 The potential of a linguistic approach as a basis for          environment . This sub-area will become increasingly
methods to analyse existing programs will be investigated.      important as the programme matures .
A prototype system supporting these methods will be
evaluated by performing extensive experiments.
                                                                2.4.1 .    Topics
Projects 974 and 1094 are seen as complementary : both
projects aim at reusability, but with different emphasis :      The topics to be included in this area are :
one project aims at new industrial practices allowing
software configuration by reusing components ; the               Evaluation and demonstration projects for specific
other one tackles the design aspects of the problem ,           methods and /or techniques
and looks for reusable concepts .                                Evaluation and demonstration projects for integration
                                                                 issues
Both projects will exchange information and delivera­
bles to avoid duplication of work.
                                                                2.4.2 .    Current Projects and Projects Under Negotiation
                                                                 Evaluation and demonstration projects for specific
Host/Target issues                                               methods and /or techniques
At the moment there are no projects covering this area .             'Software Development Demonstrator through GRAS­
                                                                                    PIN Methods and Tools '
                                                                 Proj. Ref. 800: A /85
2.3.3 .    Scope for Further Work
                                                                  This project will evaluate and demonstrate the suitability
The work started in 1983 on the Portable Common                  of the state of the art in software development technol­
Tool Environment ( PCTE) has provided the central                ogy, for industrial purposes. The methodology and its
core of the first generation environments work for the           basic set of support tools will be provided by the GRAS­
ESPRIT software technology programme . The inter­                 PIN project ( PI 25).
faces defined by this project provide the necessary link
for the integration of the tools being produced within            The evaluation and demonstrating of the GRASPIN
the other subareas of the ST workplan .                          methodology and tools will be done with respect to pro­
                                                                jects in two application fields : Computer Integrated
                                                                  Manufacturing and Office Automation .
 As a result of the supplementary call for proposals in
  1985 work on advanced environments and host /target
 issues is expected to be launched in 1986 .                       'Demonstration of Prospectra Methodology and System '
 The work supported within the subarea must provide               Proj. Ref. 835 : A /85
 the framework for the adoption of the integrated sup­
 port environments into industry . It is important there­         The PROSPECTRA project will provide a rigorous meth­
 fore to ensure that the ongoing work includes :                 odology for developing correct software and a
 ---pagebreak---  No L 365 /32                            Official Journal of the European Communities                                  31 . 12 . 85
comprehensive support system . The method and the tools             and it is now feasible to begin the experimentation and
 represent a significant departure from the current practice        evaluation process.
 in the industry. The proposed project will demonstrate the
feasibility of applying this methodology and its support
 tools to real-life industrial projects.
                                                                    This is a particularly important part of the ST workplan
                                                                    and it is likely that a number of small demonstrator
 Evaluation and demonstration projects for integration              projects together with a limited number of large
 issues                                                             demonstrator projects will be considered for inclusion
                                                                    in call(s) for proposals published in 1986.
 At the moment there are no projects covering this area .
                                                                    The objective of the demonstrator projects is to eval­
 2.4.3 .    Scope of Future Work                                    uate the methods, tools and development support envi­
                                                                    ronments in an industrial environment . Funding for
 The work underway currently is reaching the stage at               specific application developments will not be provided
 which early prototype models are becoming available                unless for evaluation purposes.
                                                      SUBPROGRAMME 3 :
                                    ADVANCED INFORMATION PROCESSING (AIP)
 3.0 .    Introduction                                               The following themes will be given priority for new
                                                                     work called for in call(s) for proposals published in
 The ESPRIT workprogramme for AIP was developed                      1986 :
 to ensures support of advanced techniques for the pro­              (i )    demonstrators (see section 3 . 1 .3)
 cessing of information . It was recognized that the
 future requirements for information processing could                (ii)    multi-sensor systems (see section 3.2.3 )
 not be met by the more traditional computational                    (iii ) integration of numeric and symbolic processing
 methods and hardware and software architectures, and                        (see section 3.4.3 )
 therefore a programme was defined to cover :
 (i ) knowledge engineering
                                                                                R&D Area 3.1 : Knowledge Engineering
 ( ii ) advanced signal processing including man-machine
        interfaces
                                                                     This R & D area is concerned with the tools and tech­
 (iii ) information and knowledge storage                            nologies needed to develop Knowledge Based Systems .
 ( iv ) computer architectures
 The AIP sub-programme is, by definition, addressing                 3.1.1 .   Topics
 primarily advanced research topics and therefore it is to
 be expected that the major topics listed above will need            The topic of knowledge engineering needs to be
 continued support in 1986. However, some encourag­                  addressed by a balanced programme of theoretical
 ing results have already been obtained , particularly in            studies and practical research and development pro­
 the early applications of knowledge engineering tech­              jects , which will provide the methods and tools
 niques, and the opportunities to use the AIP Technolo­              required to move this new engineering domain progres­
 gies within the other sub-areas of the ESPRIT pro­                  sively into commercial and industrial environments .
 gramme will become increasingly more evident. To
  assist in this technology transfer, greater emphasis will
  need to be given to the work on advanced system                    The topics within this subarea are :
  design methods and the focusing projects which will                — Knowledge Processing
  provide the qualitative and quantitative assessments                     It comprises Knowledge acquisition, representa­
  necessary to support the movement of this technology                     tion , manipulation including inference techniques
  into industry.                                                           and learning techniques .
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                            Official Journal of the European Communities                               No L 365 / 33
— Dialogue and Natural Language including use of                   representational schemes interpreted by different infer­
      graphics                                                     ence engines . A promising architecture appears to be one
— Development and Application of Knowledge                         which considers each knowledge source to be an indepen­
       Based Systems into the operational environments             dent agent, which only communicates with other such
                                                                   agents via a global data structure, under the supervision
                                                                   of a flexible scheduler capable of reasoning about con­
                                                                   trol. In addition to architectural issues, the project
                                                                   emphasizes the importance of user modelling in man­
3.1.2 .    Current Projects and Projects Under Negotiation         machine dialogue and the use of large databases to pro­
                                                                    vide an advisor with comprehensive information .
Knowledge Processing
                                                                    The concepts proposed have been validated in the early
        Knowledge Integration & Management Systems '               stages of the project, and work is underway on a financial
                                                                    investment adviser to be demonstrated in 1986 .
Proj. Ref. 11 2 : A /83
The project is designed to investigate key areas of infor­
mation processing such as knowledge representation ,
inferencing techniques and human computer interfaces .                    'Advanced Logical Programming Environments
Emphasis is on a language for knowledge representation
and management based on LISP and PROLOG ; an                        Proj. Ref 363-1-973 : B/84
expert system suited to assist sales engineers in designing
computer configurations ; an expert system serving office           The objective is to produce a prototype Advanced Pro­
personnel to perform complex office procedures ( e.g.              gramming Environment for industrial use. A number of
resource planning). These complementary tasks focus on              areas will be addressed; programme execution on either
the development of hardware and software components to             parallel or classical architectures ; program creation from
manage the problems resulting from the size and com­                a specification language ; abstract data type specification
plexity of large knowledge bases and the associated rea­            and theorem proving ifappropriate.
soning mechanisms .
 The wide potential applications are underpinned by an               To study and develop the tools necessary for an Environ­
engineering approach where existing tools like OMEGA                ment for a Logical Programming language like
were taken apart to investigate the fundamental struc­              PROLOG, the project merges several academic and
ture .                                                              industrial research groups working on this subject. It
                                                                    aims at improving the programmer 's reliability by taking
A development system for the combination of knowledge              advantage firstly of the relational nature of Logical pro­
sources andfor communities of cooperating agents is cur­           gramming which allows clear executable , but maybe inef­
rently in the implementation phase. Finally, a manipula­           ficient, specifications and. secondly, of its good behaviour
tion system for large knowledge bases will be developed.            relative to theorem proving which allows much better veri­
As an example, art extended PROLOG Systems confi­                  fication and validation possibilities.
gurator had been built and is being used for systems
assembly by some of the partners .
                                                                           'Integration of Symbolic and Numeric Learning
        An Architecture for Interactive Problem Solving                                      Techniques '
          by Cooperating Data and Knowledge Bases '
                                                                    Proj. Ref 1063 : B/85
Proj. Ref 316 : A /84
                                                                    The objective of this work is to improve knowledge
                                                                    acquisition for KB Systems. The project will identify the
 The main goal of the project is the design and implemen­           best features from different approaches to knowledge
tation of an expert system architecture for advice-giving .         acquisition , in order to improve the quality of 'noisy '
 The original goal of a user seeking advice may be ill­             data .
defined and there may be a huge number of potential
solutions for the user to choose from . The purpose of an
automatic advisor is to help the user articulate his goals
and then to generate candidate solutions for the user to            The project will be based around existing software :
accept or reject . The main computational problem to be             MAIN - based around Michalski 's INDUCE and AQ11 ,
solved is one of controlling the cooperative functioning of        a symbolic learner; AGAPE and AGAPE-C which use
several sources of knowledge, which may use different               theorem proving techniques and taxonomies of
 ---pagebreak---  No L 365 / 34                         Official Journal of the European Communities                                  31 . 12 . 85
 descriptors of example sets ; and NEDDIE which is an              guage front-end to a students ' records database . An
 extended version of Quinlan 's ID3, which uses numerical          important element of the implementation will be the use
 manipulation to constrain its search space.                       of non-verbal systems (e.g. , graphics, pointing , icons) in
                                                                   roles analogous to the non-verbal components of human
                                                                   dialogues .
An example application will be demonstrated in 1987
showing integrated learning of symbolic and numerical
methods .                                                          The robust dialogue component of the project has poten­
                                                                  tial applications outside the database domain . Elements
                                                                  of it can be used in the development of a front-end to
See also Proj. Ref. 107 described under 3.3.                      expert systems or for information retrieval in an office
                                                                   environment .
                                                                     ' Graphics and Knowledge Based Dialoguefor Dynamic
    Dialogue and Natural Language                                                             Systems '
  'A CORD : Construction and Interrogation ofKnowledge             Proj. Ref 857: A /85
     Bases Using Natural Language Text and Graphics '
Proj. Ref. 393 : A /84
                                                                   This project will develop improved user/system interfaces
                                                                  for dynamic large-scale industrial control systems, by the
                                                                  design of intelligent graphics and knowledge base
The ACORD project focusses on a trilingual (French .               dialogue systems.
German and English) system for the automatic construc­
tion of a knowledge base output of a natural language              Three cooperating knowledge processing expert systems
text and a retrieval and manipulation system aimed at              will be built, that will give the operator of a supervision
casual users . The knowledge base will be built from docu­         and control (S&C) system intelligent support in diagnos­
ments combining text and graphics (encyclopedia or tech­           ing and recovering from faults, and will provide an intelli­
nical type) and will be based on PROLOG. The deep                 gent graphics interface.
representation will be accessible from several components
of the systems interface. The analysis of texts will be
based on recent results in theoretical linguistics (discourse      A further aim of the project is to assemble different KBS
representation theory andfunctional grammars).                     Demonstrators for use in 'hard-tech ' industrial environ­
                                                                   ments and to identify appropriate metrication aspects and
                                                                   methods .
 The knowledge representation will be based on recent
results in formal semantics and on logical theory of data           The project will develop expertise by building a set of dia­
bases .                                                            logue design and specification tools for use in solving
                                                                   problems identified during a surrey of users of S&C
                                                                   systems . These tools will then be used and tested through­
 To support dialogue , the system will select appropriate           out the project, to build these systems.
presentation of output, text or graphics, and identify
 relevant informal ion for output. The system interface will        The project attempts to identify metrics which are of
feature a symbiotic interplay of graphics and natural              significance, and methods for their assessment.
 language.
                                                                   See also Proj. Ref 107, 311 described under 3.3 and
                                                                    Proj. Ref. 1015 described under 3.6 .
     Communication Failure in Dialogue : Techniquesfor
                    Detection and Repair '
                                                                   Development and Application of Knowledge Based Sys­
                                                                   tems
 Proj. Ref. 527: B'84
                                                                                       Expert System Builder '
 The aim of this project is the development of a robust and
portable natural-language interface to a relational data­          Proj. Ref. 96 : A /83
 base system .
                                                                    The aim of the project is to provide a system enabling
  The initial stages of the project involve the study of           expert systems to be developed and tested by personnel
 human dialogues in a simulated database-query environ­            inexperienced in artificial intelligence. A ring structured
 ment, including recovery from various types of communi­           model has been identified for the system to allow progres­
 cation failure. From an analysis of these dialogues a             sive development and extension of the facilities within the
formal model of the dialogue process will be developed.            individual layers, with the inner rings being completely
  The formal model will serve as a basis for a computer            independent of the domain . The test system provides the
 implementation of an English and Italian natural-Ian­             tool set for the upper layers, with the capability for later
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                            Official Journal of the European Communities                            No L 365 /35
extensions. A particular domain has been chosen , that of          myographic (EMG) examination of patients with neurol­
diagnosis of electronic systems, because of its increasing         ogical disease. In the short term expert assistance will be
demand in equipment and manufacturing, and labour                  implemented on two separate, well-defined and important
intensiveness of the methods presently employed.                   aspects of the EMG problem ; in the longer term a more
                                                                   ambitious system will be developed to provide more com­
Implementation of the tools on symbolic processors has             prehensive assistance to the physician . The first system
commenced. Portability of the eventual software and the            will be demonstrated in 1986 to exemplify the intercon­
independance from domain specific characteristics are              nect of signal acquisition , knowledge based systems and
the main design factors. The first demonstrations ran              medical expertise.
successfully in September 1 984.
                                                                      'Design , Experimentation ofa KBS Architecture and
                                                                      Tool Kitfor Real Time Process Control Applications '
    ' Time Dependency and System Modelling in KBS 's
          Design for Industrial Process Applications '
                                                                   Proj. Ref. 820 + 865+1096 : A /85
Proj. Ref. 256 : B/84
                                                                   This project deals with KBS tools for real time applica­
                                                                   tions. The first phase concerns the study of the current
The project addresses some of the research topics con­             state of the art in KBS for process applications. The
nected with the design of KBS 's that have to closely inter­       second phase is a design and implementation of a proto­
act with complex processes (e.g. industrial diagnosis ,            type KBS toolkit. The toolkit developed will offer a con­
plant monitoring, process control, etc.), thus being able to       crete working environment for KBS designers in a com­
deal with a type of reasoning where time dependency is             plex domain .
crucial and where there is a specific need for representing
and using qualitative models ofphysical systems .
                                                                   The work will concentrate on one aspect such as CAD
                                                                   systems .
A detailed study at the level of system design (midway
between pure speculation and prototyping) is to assess the
state of the art and to define of effective architectures          The project will investigate how the knowledge structure
and knowledge representation paradigms .                           of multilevel hierarchical real-time industrial control
                                                                   systems maybe partitionedthrough well-definedabstraction
                                                                   levels which will allow separation of control (procedural)
                                                                   knowledge from descriptive (declarative) knowledge. It
  'Knowledge Representation and Inference Techniques in
                                                                   will also define metrication techniques which will be eval­
                      Industrial Control '                         uated in conjunction with the building of demonstrators.
Proj. Ref 387: A /84
 The aim of the project is to design and implement an              3.1.3 .  Scope for Further Work
Expert System to assist maintenance, fault diagnosis ,
optimization of data flows , and control in an industrial          Current projects provide a reasonable coverage of the
process-control environment of very high complexity.               basic knowledge engineering techniques . The applica­
                                                                   tion of knowledge-based systems ( KBS) into the opera­
 Therefore the Expert Control System must take the time-­          tional environment is becoming increasingly important.
dependency into account, and capturing of input data
must be accomplished automatically and intelligently.              Small projects addressing the demonstration of KBS
                                                                   techniques and tools in the industrial environment are
 To overcome complexity barriers in such devices, a                likely to be considered for inclusion in the call(s) for
machine learning capability is included.                           proposals published in 1986. The objective of the
                                                                   demonstrator projects is to evaluate the methods, tools
                                                                   and development support environments in an indus­
Advances over existing Control Systems lie in making               trial environment . Funding for specific application
process-control more secure by assisting the operator in           developments will not be provided unless for evalua­
his decisions and by reducing the drop-out rate of the             tion purposes .
controlling devices .
     'Knowledge Based Assistantfor Electromyography '                R & D Area 3.2 : Advanced Signal Processing including
                                                                                    Man-Machine Interfaces
Proj. Ref. 599 : B/84
                                                                    Work under this part of the AIP sub-programme is con­
 The aim of the project is to develop a knowledge based             cerned with the development of methods and tech­
assistant to support physicians in all stages of an electro         niques to enable the control of computer-based
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 / 36                           Official Journal of the European Communities                                   31 . 12 . 85
systems, including through appropriate man-machine                          'A Study of Real-time Perspective Synthesis '
interfaces . The signal processing element needs to be
able to accept a wide range of signals , and be capable             Proj. Ref. 411 : A /84
of information extraction , interpretation for the support
of decision making in real-time.
                                                                    The purpose of this R&D work is to study picture syn­
                                                                    thesis based on a very compact 20 Gigabits sequential/
                                                                   random read only memory and high speed processors
                                                                    which can supply picture synthesis techniques in real time.
                                                                    The main work will be to study the feasibility of 35 mm
3.2.1 .  Topics                                                    film for data storage and to design the interface hard­
                                                                    ware and software techniques which are required for the
The topics within this area are :                                  completion of an experimental system. In order to iden­
                                                                    tify desired design features, the picture synthesis will be
— Image Processing ( 2-dimensional and 3-dimen­                     used on a 3D display mix of computer graphics and
     sional images , depth and motion analysis and pic­             terrain images for cockpit instrumentation .
     ture synthesis)
— Speech recognition and understanding ( in parti­
     cular continuous speech input and speaker
                                                                    Initial results of the study have been established for a
      independence)                                                 variety of recording and coding schemes, reading tech­
                                                                    niques andfilm substrates.
— Multi-sensor signal processing i.e. the combination
     of a number of separate input signals into a single
     interpretation of the current status of the opera­
     tional environment where the signals are derived               This project has cross-references to ESPRIT area 3.3
     from vision , sound, touch , sensors, etc.                     'Information and Knowledge Storage '.
                                                                                Image and Movement Understanding '
3.2.2 .  Current Projects and Projects under Negotiation
                                                                    Proj. Ref. 419: B/84
Image Processing
                                                                     The proposed research is directed to understand the com­
                                                                   putational bases of vision and movement, with particular
     Advanced Algorithms and Architecturesfor Signal                reference to scene understanding and cursive script
                         processing '                               understanding. With regard to scene understanding
                                                                    (based on stereo pairs or multiple views of pictorial
Proj. Ref. 26 : A /83                                               images as input to the system ) the project is focussed on
                                                                    the interface between the 'early stages ' of computation ,
Main objective of the project is to develop a real time sig­        which provide rich but ambiguous descriptions in terms of
nal processing system that is designed to be compatible             low-level features , and the 'knowledge-based ' processing,
between first (i.e. feature extraction ) and successive (i.e.       which generates descriptions of 3D organization of the
recognition and understanding) levels of computing func­            visual world compatible with the properties of the physical
tions. The work has therefore been planned to run in                world. With regard to cursive script , we think that recog­
three parallel areas : speech analysis , image analysis , sig­      nition is still a far goal. Basic knowledge needs still to be
nal recognition and understanding .                                 acquired about the mapping from linguistic material to
                                                                    hand trajectories. The goal of the project is to understand
                                                                    the writing process more than recognize it. Furthermore,
 For image processing, the approach consists of extracting           we address the cognitive modeling aspect with the hypo­
and manipulating the information that is contained                   thesis that interfacing it with a signal processing stage is
 within the image .                                                  essentially common to vision and movement.
 This information may be described either in terms of
structures such as edges , shapes, degrees of movement
 and textures, or in term of statistical constructs. Early
 achievements include an edge detector based on texture               'Real time generation and display ofthe 2.5 D sketch for
                                                                                            moving scenes '
 changes and an optimal shape interpolation technique
 based on dynamic programming. The initial application
 target is the development of a set of tools, both algo­             Proj. Ref. 532: B/84
 rithmic and hardware , for this level of processing. Appli­
 cations involving medical imagery and industrial inspec­            The project will develop and implement a demonstrator
 tion will be used to test these tools and to study architec­       prototype of an imaging system which is capable ofprod­
 tural and implementation issues.                                    ucing a form of 2.5 D sketch directly. This sketch , in
 ---pagebreak---   31 . 12 . 85                         Official Journal of the European Communities                              No L 365 / 37
 which image intensity will he related to range, will be in       of this project consist not only of theoretical studies for
 one-to-one pixel correspondence with an illumination             the reconstruction of 3 D structure and determination of
 intensity representation generated simultaneously.               motion parameters, but also in the design and prototyp­
 Statistical operations performed on successive range             ing of a vision system as well as its implementation in
 estimates should permit a marked improvement over the             VLSI.
 single measure resolution .
                                                                           '2-D Coherent Optical Dynamic Processor '
   'Integrated Optic Technologiesfor Real Time Wideband           Proj. Ref 1035 : B/85
                   Optical Signal Processing
                                                                  The purpose of the project is to develop and implement an
 Proj. Ref. 866 : B/85                                            optical correlator for pattern recognition based on the
                                                                  most recent technological developments. The feasibility of
                                                                  parallel optical signal processing is demonstrated by
 The scope of this project is to develop an integrated            using a spatial light modulator ( electrically and/ or opti­
 acousto-optical device including various optical elements        cally), a solid state laser, and non linear components
 as well as the radiation source and suitable detectors for       based on the Four Wave Mixing fFWM) process , allow­
 one-dimensional signal processing in the 0.1-10 GHz              ing real time modification of the correlation function . By
 range . Applications for such a device range from super­         improving the spatial light modulator and FWM compo­
fast LAN connections to (1-D) correlation in radar pro­           nents technology, a corresponding improvement in
 cessing systems (for dynamic clutter rejection). The device      processor performance is demonstrated, leading ulti­
 is to be rugged and compact.                                     mately to a resolution of 1 200 x 1 200 pixels in parallel
                                                                  at a standard TVframe rate.
    'External Interfacefor Processing of3-D Holographics
               Images for Analysis and Control '                  Speech Recognition and Understanding
 Proj. Ref. 898 : B/85                                                'Advanced Algorithms and Architecturesfor Signal
                                                                                          Processing '
 The aim of the project is the development of an external
interface system , that links physically generated 3-D            Proj. Ref 26 : A/83
images to inspection and analysis procedures. While this
has to be a general and flexible system , it is used in this       With respect to speech the target will be to extend current
project for holographic interferograms and X-ray                  state of the art techniques for recognition . This will be
radiographs for applications in areas such as real time           achieved by combining the complementary approaches of
testing and inspection and 3-D measurement. For this              automatic classification techniques . Hidden Markov
task, optical and electronic methods have to be combined          Models, and feature extraction . The resulting system will
in order to extract the relevant information from multiple        be tested using a vocabulary in the order of 1 000 words
3-D images. A further aim of the project is the automa­           with constrained syntax and using continuous speech .
tion of the holographic interferometry and the X-ray              Subsequent work will consist both of improvement to the
radioscopy for on-line testing in the manufacturing pro­          system and its constituent techniques and of interfacing
cess .
                                                                  this system to higher levels of recognition and under­
                                                                  standing . A front end for diphones recognition was
                                                                  demonstrated in 1984 .
                 'Depth and Motion Analysis '
Proj. Ref. 940 : A/85
                                                                  Multisensor Signal Processing
 The objective of this project is to solve a mathematical
and theoretical problem underlying depth and motion               At present no project addresses this topic.
analysis at the level of hardware implementation . Proto­
types of a vision system will be constructed, which will be
able to guide a mobile vehicle, or arms of industrial
robots , during obstacle avoidance and arm manipulation .
                                                                  3.2.3 . Scope for Further Work
 The accomplishment of this project is relevant to robotics ,     Current projects provide a reasonable coverage of
factory automation and aerospace technology. The tasks            systems for feature extraction . The more complex
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 / 38                          Official Journal of the European Communities                                   31 . 12 . 85
problems of multi-sensor systems need to be given a               approaches and, eventually, of finding out criteria in
higher priority for future work .                                 favour of the adoption of one of them , in order to start
                                                                   the design of a system embodying the selected approach .
It is likely that a large project in this area will be con­
sidered for inclusion in call(s) for proposals published
in 1986 .
                                                                        'Advanced Knowledge Base Management System '
                                                                   Proj. Ref. 530 : A/84
    R & D 3.3 Area : Information and Knowledge Storage              The project studies and develops a prototype of KBMS,
                                                                   obtained by integrating the data base technology with an
Effective knowledge based systems will need to be able             inference component, based on logic programming tech­
to access information and knowledge in the most time-­             nology. Different integration mechanisms and different
efficient manner, and this data will need to be stored in          strategies for knowledge partitioning are evaluated with
the most space-efficient manner.                                   respect to performance and reusability of existing data
                                                                   bases. Options using distributed DBMS and/or defining
                                                                   the distributed architecture at the inference component
                                                                   level will be considered and a structure will be chosen for
                                                                   prototyping . The possibility of using the data base tech­
                                                                   nology to store the deductive knowledge will also be
 3.3 1 .  Topics                                                   studied as a possible solution for very large knowledge­
                                                                   based systems. The project will develop tools ( typically
 The topics within this area are :                                 concerned with various user interfaces) for building and
 — Definition and Implementation of new Data/                      using knowledge-based systems .
      Knowledge base building mechanisms . They are
      required to achieve acceptable space-time trade­
      offs for the advanced knowledge-based systems .
 — New Data/ Knowledge base accesses                                 'Next Generation Integrated Data Base and Knowledge
 — New physical devices                                                              Base Management System '
                                                                    Proj. Ref. 1005 :
                                                                    Proj. Ref. 1117: A /85
                                                                    Proj. Ref. 1133 :
 3.3.2 .  Current Projects and Projects under Negotiation
                                                                    The role of this composite project is to design and imple­
 Definition and Implementation of New Data / Know­                  ment a simulator for an advanced Integrated DB and
 ledge Base Building Mechanisms.                                    KB MS by considering results of earlier ESPRIT projects
                                                                    as well as new developments outside ESPRIT. This will
   Advanced Data and Knowledge Management Systems '                 include access to non-integrated and heterogeneous data
                                                                    and knowledge bases, various forms of knowledge repre­
                                                                    sentations and programming. The system will also pro­
 Proj. Ref. 311 : A /84                                             vide a user-friendly interaction . Application areas will be
                                                                    studied and chosen for a simulation . Further features of
 The project aims at the definition of an advanced system           this project are : study ofparallel architecture for storage
 which allows an intelligent and efficient management of            and processing, and the design of suitable inference
 large amounts of information stored in it . The following          machines .
 topics will be addressed:
 1.    Information and knowledge storage organisation for
      deduction and retrieval of facts from a specific
      domain using possibly incomplete and inexact know­             The three individual projects are :
      ledge about the domain (and related meta-know­
      ledge).                                                       Proj. Ref 1005 : B /85. ' Next Generation Data Base
 2.    Definition of optimisation techniques at the domain          Management System — MUST which is concerned with
      independent level as well as at the domain dependent         preliminary phases in the development of the next genera­
      levelfor efficient access .                                   tion databases management system .
 3.   A natural language interpreter.
                                                                    Proj. Ref. 1133 : B/85. 'Advanced Model for Integration
  The project will also address issues related to logic             of DB and KB Management Systems ' which aims at the
 programming, with the goal of comparing the two                    feasibility of integrating DB and KB MS.
 ---pagebreak---  31 . 12 . 85                            Official Journal of the European Comm unities                           No L 365 / 39
 Proj. Ref 1117: B/85. 'Knowledge Based User Friendly               and knowledge bases . The schemata of existing data­
 System for the Utilisation of Information Bases ' which is         bases will be described by semantic data models .
 aimed at a KBS to provide support for the access and use
 of information from an information base.
                                                                    The work of thefirst year study consists of:
                                                                    — Design of a standard interface to heterogeneous
                                                                         distributed databases based on a conceptual data
                                                                         model ;
New Data / Knowledge accesses
                                                                    — Development of an interaction methodology between
     'A Logic-oriented Approach to Knowledge and Data                    the user and the system based on logical indepen­
           Bases Supporting Natural User Interaction '                   dence ;
                                                                    — Design of an advanced application environment for
 Proj. Ref 107: A/83                                                     end-users concerned with modelling some reality,
                                                                         handling existing data and knowledge and creating
 A Logic Oriented Approach to Knowledge and Data                         solutions to standard or unexpected problems .
 Bases , supporting Natural User Interaction ( LOKIj
 applies logic programming in a number of novel ways , to
 systems software and to knowledge-based applications .
                                                                      High Densities Mass Storage Memories for Knowledge
                                                                                     and Information Storage '
 The systems software work is all based on a new Prolog,
 Special tools allowing access to databases at source level
 by a variety of Prolog-type languages. These tools will            Proj. Ref. 957: A /85
form the implementation language for a high-level know­
 ledge representation formalism . A conceptual modelling             This project is to develop further techniques associated
 language (CML) will be developed for general real world            with storage technology, covering perpendicular recording
 application , based on frames definable within predicate           on floppy and rigid discs , and magneto-optical recording.
 calculus .                                                         In addition to the development of basic components to
                                                                    support these technologies, work will he carried out into
                                                                    defining the internal coding of the data , local intellig­
 One use of CML will be to store the knowledge of project           ence ' characteristics of the storage device and system
 management required by one of the project 's two applica­          requirements using the devices.
 tion systems with a German and English front-end.
 Another application is the development of an expert sys­            The three-year objectives of this project include proto­
 tem that models some of the knowledge used in aircraft             types for perpendicular magnetic recording on floppy and
 design . This is called ADROIT, and a first prototype,             hard disks with densities ofabout 100 000fci and the pre­
 restricted to wing design , is already complete .                  sentation of a thermomagnetic disc drive with at least
                                                                    15 000fci and 150 ms access time.
          Intelligent Helpfor Information System Users '
  Proj . Ref. 280 : B/ 84                                           3.3.3 .  Scope for further work
  The project proposes to investigate approaches towards            Current projects provide a reasonable coverage of this
                                                                    subarea .
 helping users of information systems learn optimally to
  exploit the functions of those information systems . These
 approaches will be operationally implemented in the form           It is unlikely that this area will be considered for
 of a prototype HELP system to provide guidelines,                  inclusion in call(s) for proposals published in 1986.
 instructions and explanations to user requests for inform­
 ation systems facilities . A set of UNIX utilities have
 been targetted, and based on this a demonstration of a
 structural help system was given in 1985.
                                                                              R & D 3.4 Area : Computer Architectures
                                                                     This R & D area investigates the potential for new
                                                                     forms of computer architectures .
   'Knowledge Based User Friendly Interfacesfor the utilis­
                    ation of Information Bases '
  Proj. Ref. 641 : B/84
                                                                    3.4.1 .  Topics
  The project defines a knowledge-based system to provide
 user-friendly interfaces to existing and new databases             The topics within this subarea are :
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 / 40                         Official Journal of the European Communities                                   31 . 12 . 85
— Development of new communication mechanisms                    implement some of them in systems nearer to the com­
      This will allow greater connectivity of machines           mercial sphere. The prime objective is to reduce the exe­
      supporting current architectures .                         cution times required by A.I. applications by a substan­
— Development           of   non-von-Neumann      machine        tial factor. Concurrency will be achieved through a large
      architectures                                              number of identical processing elements implemented in
                                                                  VLSI. Ideally, a concurrent machine should support all
— Development of architectures for the integration of            three programming styles (object oriented, functional and
      numeric and symbolic processing                            logic) which will allow the full exploitation of concur­
— Advanced Machine Architectures for highly con­                 rency, but the principles upon which such a machine could
      current processing .                                       be based are not yet fully understood. All three styles will
                                                                 be explored through studies into machines which support
The topic of advanced machine architectures necessar­            each programming style separately, and through common
ily includes consideration of machine performance,               working groups which will explore several areas of
reliability and availability (hardware and software              general relevance.
aspects ) and the development of appropriate develop­
ment support environments . The work will promote                All subprojects are based on messages passing between
advances in basic hardware and software technology by            identical units, here called PCMs , consisting of communi­
providing early indication of the requirements from              cation hardware, processing hardware and local memory.
work in the microelectronics and software areas with             In addition to the subprojects and working groups, an
respect to advance components, and will also provide             application study group will be formed to select applica­
fruitful applications areas for these technologies , e.g.        tions with which the various styles may be evaluated and
architectures for optical computing.                             their suitability for various fields of application estab­
                                                                 lished.
Advances in computer system design is a fundamental
prerequisite of successful realization of many of the
targets for the development of information technology .            'Parallel Associative Development Machine as a Vehicle
                                                                                            for A.I. '
                                                                 Proj. Ref. 967+1106 : A /85
3.4.2 .  Current projects and projects under negotiation
                                                                  Time critical applications, such as 'real time ' speech and
Development of new communication mechanisms.                     image understanding need suitable high-performance
                                                                 computer systems .
   ' The Connection Machine : a Dependable Open Distri­
                  buted System Architecture '                     This project is intended to address this requirement bv the
                                                                 construction of a common development machine
 Prof Ref. 818 : B/85                                            (PADMAVATI). The proposed machine architecture will
                                                                 be based on an array of computational nodes each
 This project will look at the basic problems of an OSI          containing a high performance microprocessor, memory
 LAN architecture with fault tolerance as a primary              and communication interfaces . The programming envi­
 requirement.                                                    ronment will be based on standard Prolog and Lisp with
                                                                 extensions to support parallel execution . The resulting
                                                                 hardware architecture and software system wilt be tested
        Integrated Environmentfor Reliable Systems '             by implementing experimental, computationally intensive
                                                                 tasks from the fields of natural language, speech and
Proj. Ref. 874 : B/ 85                                           image understanding on the completed machine .
 The one year period will be used to clearly specify each
part of their overall tem design (architecture, host             Development of architectures for integration of numeric
software, interconnection) with reliability and fault toler­     and symbolic processing.
ance functionality
                                                                  At present no project addresses this topic.
Development        of     non    von-Neumann      machines
architectures                                                     Advance Machine Architectures for highly concurrent
                                                                 processing.
      'Parallel Architectures and Languages for A1P —
                 A VLSI Directed Approach '                       'Message Passing Architectures and Description Systems '
 Proj. Ref 415 + 313 : A /84                                      Proj. Ref 440 : B/84
  This project aims to investigate the different non-von­         The project will build three levels of tools for the develop­
 Neuman architectures previously described and                    ment of Expert systems :
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                            Official Journal of the European Communities                                 No L 365 /41
— Message passing languages                                        3.4.3 .   Scope for Further Work
— Description languages for knowledge representation
                                                                   Current projects provide a reasonable coverage of all
— Reasoning and strategy programming
                                                                   topics included in this except for the integration of
                                                                   symbolic and numeric processing.
 The project will develop techniques for implementing
message passing languages that will exploit new highly
parallel architectures .                                           It is likely that a large project in this area will be con­
                                                                   sidered for inclusion in call(s) for proposals published
                                                                   in 1986 .
The techniques wilt cover issues of run-time support like
allocation , migration , garbage-collection and persistency
of actors. A description system will be developed to sup­
port the basic mechanisms of knowledge representation :
conceptual hierarchies, inheritance, attributions.
                                                                            R & D 3.5 Area : Design and System Aspects
 To perform reasoning on the description system , rather
than providing a fixed strategy, primitives and constructs
will he developed that will allow to programme deductive           3.5.1 . Topics
strategies tailored to specific applications . Strategy
execution will be performed concurrently by a large num­           The definition of lifecycle models for advanced infor­
ber of actors each exploring a small portion of the know­          mation processing systems will be an evolving activity
ledge base.                                                         which will need to respond to the progress being made
                                                                   in the various sub-areas of this programme. It is impor­
                                                                   tant to ensure that this topic is fully integrated with the
At the end of the project, there will be :                          related work in the Software Technology programme so
 1) a solid implementation ofmessage passing ;                      that a practical evolutionary strategy for both the inclu­
                                                                    sion of new development methods based on AIP tech­
2) techniques for exploiting specialized concurrent hard­           niques into development support environments and the
      ware to implement actors efficiently :                        production of development support environments for
3) a package of knowledge representation primitives,                the production of advanced information processing
      and                                                           systems .
4) a description system and related interaction tools ;
      with applications ranging across the KBS and MMI
      spheres.
                                                                   3.5.2 .   Current Projects and Projects under Negotiation
   'Development and Application ofa Low-Cost High Per­
             formance Multi-Processor Machines '                       'Design of Techniques and Tools to aid in the Analysis
                                                                              and Design of Knowledge Based Systems '
 Proj. Ref. 1085 : A /85
                                                                    Proj. Ref. 12/304: A /83
 The goal of this project is to develop a prototype high per­
formance flexible multiprocessor computer. A computa­                This was a pilot project that investigated the types of
 tion rate of 500 million floating point operations per             tools and design techniques necessary for the analysis ,
 second will be achieved by concurrent operation of a large         design , implementation and testing of Knowledge Based
 number of specially developed VLSI floating point pro­             Systems. The purpose was to specify the techniques which
 cessors. The machine will be implemented as a regular              will aid in the building expert system . In particular valuable
 array of 'super-nodes ' with each node consisting of typi­         work was done, and a good insight was made into ana­
 cally 20 processors . A configurable interconnection stra­         lysing the process of Knowledge Acquisition. The findings
 tegy in each node, using a switching network to be devel­          of the project were used as a basis for the proposal ofpro­
 oped in this projec t, will provide a flexible architecture       ject Ref. 1098.
 suitable for a wide range of scientific and engineering
problems.
 It is proposed to demonstrate the utility of the configura­
 ble architecture, both for use as a single-user work station               'A Methodologyfor the Development ofKBS '
 (operating with a single super-node) and as the basis for
 a large, powerful array of super-nodes, by mounting a
 range of application software. These will range over CAD            Proj. Ref 1098: A/85
for VLSI, signal-processing, large-scale modelling and
 simulation . A prototype will be built by the end of 1987,          The prime purpose of this project is to assist the transfer
 and a machine will exist by the end of 1988.                       of Knowledge Based Systems technology into commercial
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 /42                            Official Journal of the European Communities                                31 . 12 . 85
use by providing methodological guidance for the                  3.6.2.      Current Projects and Projects Under Negotiation
development process . It is believed that Knowledge Based
Systems development can be treated as a particular case                     'A Case Studyfor Satellite Data — ARTS- IP'
of software engineering and that the same requirements
must be placed on the development of Knowledge Based               Proj. Ref. 867:          /85
Sytems as on other types of software. In short KBS must
be produced to specification and to acceptable standards
by a controllable process.                                         This project is aimed at real-time image processing using
                                                                   Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images for remote
                                                                   sensing as a test-bed.
3.5.3 .   Scope for Further Work                                        'Integration ofA I, Vocal I/O and NL Dialogue —
                                                                           Application to Directory Services ( PALABRE)'
At the current time the single project underway in this
area together with the work in subprogramme software               Proj. Ref 1015 :           /85
technology is considered to be sufficient .
                                                                    This project aims to design and implement a question­
                                                                   answering system for easy access to , and modification of
 It is unlikely that this area will be considered for inclu­       an information base, integrating systems of natural lan­
sion in call(s) for proposals published in 1986 .                  guage, speech recognition , dialogue modelling and know­
                                                                   ledge based techniques .
                                                                       'Shipboard Installation of Knowledge-Based Systems
            R & D 3.6 Area : Focussing Projects                                           Conceptual Design '
3.6.1 .  Topics                                                     Proj. Ref. 1074 :         /85
The diverse but inter-related nature of the topics cov­             This project is aimed at concepts for the utilisation of
ered by advanced information processing requires that               advanced KBS on ships, and will develop systems that
the basic R & D programme be supported by a mechanism               allow ships complement to reach economic levels, allow­
for the integration of results from the various projects .          ing flagging of ships by Member States to continue, stop­
                                                                    ping the drift to flags of convenience and thus maintain­
                                                                    ing safety and performance standards.
Future information technology systems will need the
successful integration of the results from the basic tech­          3.6.3 .    Scope for Further Work
nology R & D programmes and therefore the vehicle of
focusing project-, within the AIP programme will                    The definition phases of three focusing projects are
become increasingly more important as the programme                 currently in progress . The continued support of these
matures .                                                           projects will be reviewed in the autumn of 1986 .
                                                      SUBPROGRAMME 4 :
                                                      OFFICE SYSTEMS
 4.0 .  Introduction                                                turbulent changes in business, technology, commerce
                                                                    and government .
 Information is an important instrument of competition .
 This concept is now widely recognised . Office Systems              While the potential contribution of information tech­
 provide a major vehicle through which information can              nology to improve effectiveness can be easily recog­
 be applied as an aid to navigation through the present             nised, the delivery of solutions to the information
 ---pagebreak---  31 . 12 . 85                           Official Journal of the European Communities                              No L 365 / 43
problem areas is an entirely different matter. The prob­           classical data processing to integrated information pro­
lems are 'fuzzy' and frequently the solution processes             cessing in administrations and industrial and service
appear to be artistic rather than scientific. The users of         enterprises, by which the future work environment will
information frequently have little or no knowledge of              be characterized . For that purpose , systems architec­
the technological content and necessary technical                  tures, functional modules and communication net­
processes that are involved in processing information .            works with standardized interfaces are necessary .
The majority of users require solutions and not prod­              In developing these systems, which are essential for the
ucts . These solutions have to be reasonably complete              survival of our industrial companies, human and social
and this implies that integrated systems must be prov­             factors have to be considered in the early stages of
ided, not only in the sense of the interrelationship of            planning. Only in this way can we ensure that the sys­
the technical components (both hardware and soft­                  tems will be accepted later on by the users and that
ware) but also in terms of the functions that these                economic expectation will also be met.
components perform as a support to the day-to-day
operations, planning and strategy development of
organizations .
                                                                   Taking into account the above mentioned integrated
                                                                   approach , the subprogramme has been divided into
                                                                   five research areas . The aims are :
The challenges facing Office Systems development
include :
— Providing integrated information system architec­                Office system science and human factors (4.1 )
      tures and scenarios for their implementation , that
      will alow rapid, economic and reliable adaptation            ( a ) To analyze current and predicted office activities to
      to the changing needs of a great variety of private                determine how information technology might be
      and public enterprises .                                           applied to improve the effectiveness of office work
                                                                         and organization and of the enterprise as a whole.
— Understanding and supporting the non-determinis­                       Besides automation of various functions and the
      tic tasks of a wide range of office workers and not                use of knowledge management methods , this
      just providing a technological update of traditional               means better support particularly for clerks, profes­
      and limited office functions .                                     sional and managerial staff in executing their judge­
                                                                         mental tasks .
— Achieving major improvements in human-system
      interfaces that realistically allow effective use of         ( b) To improve understanding of human, social and
      office systems by a wide range of office workers .                 cultural factors in the office and to ensure high per­
                                                                         formance of users when interacting with the sys­
— The development of solution oriented approaches                        tems, whilst at the same time offering optimal
      to office problems - Delivering product elements                   working conditions and ensuring adequate organ­
      and some services , and expecting the user to create               ization and individual acceptance .
      the total own solution cannot continue .
                                                                    Advanced workstations and human-machine interfaces
The key European opportunity relates to the develop­                (4.2)
ment of system solutions . The implications of Euro­
pean requirements must be that these solutions have an              To establish major new human-machine interface tech­
adaptability, flexibility and inbuilt interworking capa­            nologies, peripheral technologies and document repre­
bility that will be a real strength outside Europe . This           sentation technologies and information manipulation
will only be true if the application of technology                  relevant to the development of office workstations for
reflects a degree of user sensitivity in advance of our             use in advanced office systems .
major competitors .
                                                                    Communication systems (4.3 )
 Research work in the field of Office Systems can be
characterized as follows : on the basis of fundamental
and methodological developments in VLSI , software                  To create the basic technologies required for advanced
technology, and knowledge representation and some                   office communication systems including technical fun­
 other fields, integrated and applied system solutions              damentals in communication systems architecture, opt­
 are developed which take into consideration user                   ical technologies as a particularly significant technol­
requirements and foreseeable evolutions in the tech­                ogy, the management of resources connected by net­
 nical , social and economical field .                              works, and system aspects of value added services .
 The Office Systems programme provides the key ele­                  Advanced multi-media          information    storage   and
 ments and concepts that mark the development from                  retrieval systems (4.4)
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 /44                          Official Journal of the European Communities                                 31 . 12 . 85
To acquire the system and applications expertise                 Office systems analysis
related to storage and retrieval of all forms of office          (a) operational and functional analysis of office
information in electronic storage systems in a user                   requirements
organization in an adequate way .
                                                                 (b) benefits analysis
Integrated office information systems (4.5)                      (c) a glossary of agreed terminology
                                                                 (d) analysis of human tasks within the office
To create flexible, reliable and economical total infor­
mation system architectures and implementation
scenarios, and to check the validity of the total infor­         Office systems design
mation concepts in environments that are realistic and           (a) office system design methodology
allow quantitive evaluation .
                                                                 (b) modelling and simulation of office information
                                                                       systems
Priority will be given to integration projects especially
in area 4.5 .                                                    (c) transaction monitor
                                                                 (d) deterministic and judgemental functions
                                                                 (e) techniques for user interface design
                                                                  Human factors
R&D area 4.1 : Office Systems Science and Human Fac­
                            tors                                 (a) human factors laboratories
                                                                 (b) human-machine cognitive compatibility
This research programme has been devised to give a
belter understanding of the office environment. Offices          (c) qualification and work
are the 'nervous system ' of any enterprise. These must           (d) user aids and learning tools
be organized, staffed and equipped for effective and              (e) human-machine interface specification language
efficient operation , and interfaced with other branches
of the enterprise (such as research laboratories and              (f) natural language interpretation and production
manufacturing) and the external environment .
At present the understanding of this field is patchy .
There is no formal science of office automation as
there is for production automation . This programme ,
however, makes possible coherent approaches to on the            4.1.2 .   Current Projects and Projects Under Negotiation
problems, ranging from empirical studies to consistent
operational classifications and definition of computer­                   Functional Analysis of Office Requirements '
based analysis and design tools .
Consistent with this approach, the main topics identi­           Proj. Ref 56: B/83
fied are (a) office systems analysis, (b) office systems
design , (c) human factors and (d) the possible applica­          The primary goal of this project is the investigation and
tion of knowledge based methods . The analysis part of           analysis of office functions through the application of a
the programme delivers useful input for the design               new method being developed. The project will provide
oriented phases .                                                guidelines for the evaluation of available office systems,
                                                                 and it will support the manufacturers choice offacilities
 It is evident that the incorporation of human factors,           to be integrated into the system . The project includes
especially into a technology-oriented programme is an             development of methods to assess key qualitative and
essential prerequisite for effective use and a broad              quantitative benefits to be gained through the use of com­
acceptance of the envisaged systems and thus for their           puter-based office systems, and methods to assess indivi­
final economic success . The research programme there­            dual and social resistance to the eventual introduction of
 fore includes specific research projects on human fac­           information technology.
tors related to the office environment and this leads to
 programmes for cognitive aspects together with work
 stiucturing, qualification and training. Human factors            The method developed will be applied to the analysis of
 laboratories are also seen as key competence centers             information system requirements and to information
 and catalysers , offering the possibility of unbiased            technology assessment for important OS application
judgment regarding experimental systems and on com­               domains . Such domains explicitly dealt with in the project
 mercial products .                                               are at present : public administrations, large manufactur­
                                                                  ers, hospitals, the telework environment '.
 4.1.1 . Topics
                                                                   This project and the projects 285 and 813 will fully­
 The topics to be studied in this area include :                  exchange results and coordinate planning.
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                              Official Journal of the European Communities                                No L 365 /45
         Toolsfor Designing Office Systems (TODOS)'                        as an essential contribution to all parts of the design
                                                                           process cycle.
Proj. Ref 813 : B/85
                                                                            The expertise requiredfor this task will be gained in :
 The project objective is to develop tools to support office
systems design . The five goals are:                                  2.   Investigation of interaction modes of the human/
                                                                           machine interface, and construction ofa multi-modal
— to investigate models for office systems design , from                   HMI to achieve optimal interplay from the point of
      the level of detail of a feasibility analysis to the level            view of human factors.
      of detail ofan implementation specification ;
                                                                     3.    The expertise gained in 1) and 2) will be made avail­
— to provide a design support environment based on                         able to the European industry as a whole by a)
      graphical interfaces and using expert techniques to                  developing a software package for an integrated
      guide the design and identify problems and incorrect                 decision support system and b) by organising a broad
      specifications;                                                      programme ofpublications, seminars, workshops and
                                                                           consultancy activities throughout European IT indus­
— to provide tools for the evaluation of the proposed                      try.
      office models at the different development phases ;
                                                                      In the pursuance of these objectives, the primary subject
— to provide tools for the choice of an architecture for             for study will be how people use information andfor what
      the office system ;                                            purposes . User reactions to existing equipment will pro­
— to provide tools for office prototyping form specifica­             vide essential evidence for such studies .
      tion of the conceptual model.
                                                                      The output of the work is expected to be an understand­
This project and the projects 56 and 285 will coordinate              ing of intrinsic human requirements independent of
planning andfully exchange results.                                   equipment, that can be applied at every stage in product
                                                                      design from abstract conception to the resolution of con­
                                                                      crete design issues. There will be explicit recognition that
                                                                      as a consequence of the open-ended nature of the human
                                                                      use of information , conscious attention must be given to
  'Office  Support Systems Analysis and Design (OSSAD)'               the interface between an information system and its
                                                                      human designers as well as its users. Some emphasis is
                                                                      given to user learning processes and their support by
Proj. Ref 285 : B/84
                                                                      means of IT systems.
 The project aims to create a model for an integrated off­
ice system, based on the most recent studies, but going as            An additional result of the project will be the development
far as possible in a total integration . In particular the fol­        of a dynamic glossary (GLOT) in the jield of information
lowing subjects will be addressed: modelling office tasks             science and technology within 3 years . The glossary will
and activities, developing a language (grammar and                     be constructed on the basis of a large unified systemati­
 vocabulary), developing a method for the specification               zation providing not only terminological definitions but
and measurement ofperformance, producing design pro­                   also inter- and intralingual interconnections between the
cedures for office system , assessing requirements for                 lemmata and their parts. English and German terminol­
 user-oriented information management systems.                         ogy will be used in the start but in the end all languages
                                                                       of the European Communities will be included.
 This project and the projects 56 and 813 will coordinate
planning andfully exchange results.
    'Human Factor Laboratories in Information Technolo­                      'Cognitive Simulatorfor User Interface Design '
                               gies '
 Proj. Ref 385 : A/84                                                  Proj. Ref 234 : B/84
 The project aims at providing a focussing point for                    This two-vear project is aimed at the development of a
 human factors activities in Europe. Three major fields of             simulation tool to assist designers in assessing the human
 activity can be distinguished:                                        cognitive compatability ofparticular interface designs for
                                                                       comparative purposes. Deliverables include the software
 1.    The development of a methodology for the integra­              package and user guide with a review ofcognitive modell­
      tion of Human Factors knowledge into IT products                 ing and dialogue design guidelines derived from valida­
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 /46                           Official Journal of the European Communities                                  31 . 12.85
tion trials. The produced software must be compatible             coding schemes. Voice communication between man
with the results of standardization of e.g. operating             and the office system will require the development of
systems .                                                         efficient speech recognition and of a natural speech
                                                                  synthesizer.
                                                                  An important aspect of facilitating the standardization
                                                                  of the interface with the human world and the paper
4. 1 . 3 . Scope for Further Work                                 world is easy-to-use formalized languages. These are to
                                                                  be designed in a way which allows the user, rather than
This area is well covered by projects retained and is             the computer professional , to specify his needs directly
unlikely to be considered for inclusion in call(s ) for           to the system .
proposals to be published in 1986.
                                                                  The implementations and testing of user decision sup­
                                                                  port functions are considered to be imbedded in the
                                                                  workstation . Availability of these functions is supposed
                                                                  to be a key-factor in the competition among office
                                                                  products .
   R&D Area 4.2 : Advanced Workstations and Human­
                      Machine Interfaces
                                                                  The development of specific system interface compo­
                                                                  nents should lead to a general architecture which will
                                                                  allow the integration of the subsystems in an architec­
The workstation is the user's gateway to the office               turally homogenous solution . Although the work items
system . User acceptance and user performance depend              are phrased in terms of integration into a physical
on the design of the corresponding human-machine                  workstation , proposals should not necessarily be con­
interface .                                                       fined to those which assume that all the associated
                                                                  functionality is resident in the workstation . Solutions
The most important channel for information input to               involving distributed functionality accessed over com­
the human user is the visual channel . This channel , as          munication links are equally relevant .
well as the bi-directional vocal channel , have evolved
to provide information for motoric activities which                Much of the software that supports the user will reside
should be adequately integrated in operating the inter­            in the workstation . Any rules that are, or will be, agreed
face . In consequence , VDU 's and touch keyboards and             upon in order to improve portability of software,
spcech receptors will emerge to form an integrated                should be implemented . This applies also to rules and
input / output device suitable to manipulate text and             agreements with respect to other aspects of the system .
images by direct manual and vocal control . Preferably
the screens should have the dimensions and portability
of paper (electronic paper). Another approach to a
more comfortable 'visual input' will be the large screen
display. The need for muiti-functional capabilities will
require the development of devices which allow                    4.2.1 .  Topics
graphic input and editing, on-line handwriting and
ideogrammatic conversation .
                                                                  The following R &D topics are identified :
As long as there is no portable paperlike display, print­
                                                                   System aspects
ing will be necessary and the need will be growing for
faster, more versatile (text, graphic, colour) printers at        (a) System aspects of workstation design
low cost. The provision of human-machine interfaces               (b ) Workstation security
which support the complete range of functions tradi­
tionally carried out by pen or paper is necessary.                 Vision
A high proportion of telephone or face-to-face com­                (a) vision interface
munication indicates that visual and spoken informa­               (b) flat panel workstation design
tion will be preferred whenever it is applicable . Visual          (c) high resolution video imager
communication will require the development of high
 definition colour video scanning devices with the                 (d) image coding
 necessary processing capabilities for efficient storage
 and transmission and the use of the multifunction flat            Paper
 panel display .
                                                                   (a ) paper interface
 The voice channel cannot handle as much information               (b) advanced scanner
 as the vision channel but is our most efficient carrier of        (c) advanced printer
 natural language. Voice communication will require the            ( d) microfilm interface
 development of sophisticated processing for improving
 the acoustic environment, and the defelopment of                  (e) graphics coding
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                           Official Journal of the European Communities                               No L 365 /47
(f) graphics recognition                                          services to outside suppliers, transmitting and receiving
(g) intelligent graphics recognition                              graphic information and connecting the alphanumeric
                                                                  and data functions and the voice telephone system.
Speech
                                                                  A second aim of the project is to stimulate harmonization
(a ) speech interface                                              on the human and network interface levels among
(b) speech coding                                                  European manufacturers.
(c) speech recognition
(d ) speech synthesis
(e) intelligent speech recognition .                                        Componentsfor Future Computing Systems '
Office languages and procedures                                   Proj. Ref. 956 : A /85
(a) office document architectures and languages
                                                                   This project aims at the design and experimentation with
(b) office interface languages                                    a Reduced Instruction Set Computer RISC) computer of
(c) multi-media document manipulation                              European architecture, starting from the established state
(d) intelligent user function support                              of the art. The computer is primarily oriented towards
                                                                   office workstations and file servers where it would per­
(e) user to user multimedia communication                         form highly sophisticated functions in a user friendly
                                                                   manner .
4.2.2 .    Current Projects and Projects Under Negotiation             'An Office Systems Research Workstationfor Europe
                                                                                               (ERW)'
      'Secure Open Multimedia Integrated Workstation               Proj. Ref. 1032: A /85
                           (SOMiwy
                                                                   The overall objective of this project is a hardware config­
 Proj. Ref 367: A /84                                              uration and software environments suitable for research
                                                                   and prototyping advanced integrated office systems. This
 The project involves the design and implementation of an          will strengthen the European computer industry and
office workstation ( WSj which is based on the 'open sys­          reduce its dependence on costly foreign products.
 tems ' concept allowmg the generation of standard proto­
 cols jar communication media . It is thus possible to link        Specific technical objectives include developing within
 the Vi S with different types of networks and with ISDN.          3 years an advanced prototype with :
 The WS will be capable of processing different types of           — very high performance at a low cost ;
 information including : text, fixed and moving images ,
graphics, voice and hand drawings . The WS will use a              — hardware design to exploit VLSI manufacture and
 network-oriented operating system to control multiwin­                   RISC architecture in the processor design ;
 dows and a distributed database management system . Its           — open architecture so that resources elsewhere on the
 main 'hardware ' parts will involve : a 32-bit CPU, inter­              network can be substitutedfor local resources ;
 mediate capacity of disk , high resolution screen , mouse ,       — tools for language development for generating RISC
 camera , digitizer and compressor of speech , loudspeaker,              code to interpret virtual-machine instruction set ;
 optical character scanner and appropriate networking cir­
 cuits . These will be complemented by a device and proce­         — programming environments for several languages.
 dures to control access .
                                                                   A demonstrable prototype of the workstation will be
                                                                   available in the third quarter of the third vear.
  'Integration of European Typewriters as Low Cost Office
                         Workstation '
                                                                      ' Interactive Handling of Digitized Images at the User
 Proj. Ref. 855 : B/85                                                                        Interface '
 The project is aimed at assessing the future role of type­        Proj. Ref 79 : B/83
 writers connected to office networks comprising other
 workstations, file servers and data processors .                  This project covers the different aspects of picture
                                                                   handling at the user interface in an office environment:
  The project will implement and test a prototype integrat­        processing, storage, presentation and manipulation .
 ing various office functions such as electronic mail              Among the aims of the project are the identification of
 ---pagebreak---  No L 365 /48                             Official Journal of the European Communities                                  31 . 12 . 85
 user needs for picture handling in a multi-media inter­             — electronic representation of documents regardless of
face , and the development of uniform descriptors for the                 the original means ofcreation ;
picture properties .                                                 — methods for optimizing the reproduction of docu­
                                                                          ments containing pictorial coloured information .
                                                                           These include colour processing innovative compres­
                                                                          sion algorithms and enhancement of colour rendition
  'Modelling and Simulation ofthe Visual Characteristics                  methods in order to finally reproduce on an appro­
of Modern Display Technologies under Office Work Con­                     priate output device true colour pictorial information ;
                              ditions '
                                                                     — the processing to reproduce an electronic document
                                                                          for different output media (soft copy, hard copy, and
Proj . Ref. 612 ; B/84                                                     transmission);
The project aims at designing, engineering and building a            — the encoding and recognition in real time of textual
simulator in order to test properties of the displays based                and graphical information as typically produced by
                                                                           man .
upon new technologies. Specific objectives are; comparison
of displays simulated according to user acceptability
criteria ; conducting a limited number of ergonomic                  The results will be implemented in a research machine for
experiments designed to simulate prolonged office work               the purposes of evaluation and demonstration .
conditions to obtain more insight into architectural and
technology factors related to quality and 'visual confort '.         This project is complementary to project 853 .
  'A High Compression Picture Coding Algorithm for Pho­
                        tographic Videotex '
                                                                         'Acquisition, Compression and Reproduction of True
                                                                                       Colour Image Documents '
 Proj. Ref 563 : B/84
                                                                     Proj. Ref 853; B/85
 The purpose is to develop with a group that is representa­
 tive but small enough to be effective, a high compression
picture coding methodology that can be applied to televi­             The project will deal with methods for optimizing the
 sion signals. The final goal of the work is the definition of       reproduction of documents containing pictorial couloured
 a selected coding technique as a possible European stan­            information . The reproduction of a colour document con­
                                                                     sists of a few essential steps, from the input of the ori­
 dardfor photographic videotex on ISDN.
                                                                     ginal to the final print out of the copy. Further interme­
                                                                     diate steps will be developed in order to optimize the full
                                                                     process : these include colour processing innovative com­
                 ' Video Coding at 256 KBits/S '                     pression algorithms to achieve high efficiency in storage
                                                                     and transmission functions and enhancement of colour
                                                                     prictorial information .
 Proj. Ref 925 : B/85
                                                                     An integrated feasibility model will be developed to
  The project consists of surveys and specifications, and            demonstrate the results of the research . Three modules
 harmonisation efforts among leading manufacturers. The               will be produced:
 Surveys to be carried out are of the technical require­
 ments in Teleconferencing. The specifications are for               — printer prototype
 moving picture CODECS in the range 384-64 Kbit/s .                  — scanner prototype
                                                                      — coding/decoding module
                       ' The Paper Interface '                        The techniques researched should lead to low-cost
                                                                      devices .
 Proj. Ref. 295 : A /84
                                                                     This project is complementary to project 295 .
  This project addresses the role ofpaper and paper-related
processes in the context of advanced electronic office
 systems. Research will be conducted into techniques that
 efficiently handle information on paper, and that will                    'Amorphous Silicon Contact Imagerfor Office and
 promote the ultimate reduction ofpaper use.                                              Graphic Applications '
  Particular techniques considered are :                              Proj. Ref. 1051 : B/85
 — the electronic reading of previously prepared paper
       documents to encode image, and encode and recog­               The objective of this project is to develop a high resolution
       nize text and graphics ;                                       advanced contact imager for office and graphic applica
 ---pagebreak---  31 . 12.85                               Official Journal of the European Communities                              No L 365 /49
tions which will result in very compact systems . In this            Methods will be investigatedfor the specification ofappli­
project new techniques , i.e. HOMOCVD and photodisso­                cations including tolls for generating applications and
ciation to deposit amorphous Si will be investigated aim­            language specific knowledge sources.
ing at higher stability.
                                                                     Experiments will be done for English, French and
                                                                     German. The project is planned over a 5 year period.
 The project will:
— develop a linear contact type scanning image sensor                The participants are independent and industrial research
      with a-S : resulting in a very compact system ,                organizations from France and Germany with an indus­
 — investigate new techniques to improve the properties              trial partnerfrom the UK.
      of this contact imager.
                                                                     This project is complementary to project 64.
 In this first phase of a large range development pro­
 gramme, a linear contact type amorphous silicon imager
 with a matrix read-out in parallel blocks will be devel­
 oped.
                                                                            'Linguistic Analysis of the European Languages
                                                                      Proj. Ref 291 : B/84
       'Speech Interface at Office Workstations (SPIN)'
                                                                      The objective of this project is to provide, in the form of
 Proj. Ref. 64 : A/83                                                 computer data files and associated methodology, the
                                                                     following concerning a number of European languages :
 The objective of this project is to develop the basic compo­
 nents of and integrate these into, a comprehensive                   — dictionary lemmata , flections, grammatical catego­
 speech interface at the workstation . The components are :                ries ;
 speech analysis, speech recognition , speaker verification , — algorithms and tables for converting the orthographic
 speech coding and decoding, and speech synthesis.                        form into the phonetic one and vice-versa ;
                                                                      — algorithms and tablesfor the word stress assignment;
 For the integration of the components it is important to
 have an understanding of the usage of the speech in                  — statistics, ranking lemmata and flections by
 human-machine communication , and the quality/func ­                     frequency of use ;
 tionality aspects that make that the interface is accepted           — texts, suitable for extracting further statistical
 by the human users . These two aspects will be studied                    information .
 extensively.
                                                                      The project results are fundamentalfor a number of other
 As concerns the coverage of different natural languages,             projects, in particular those dealing with the natural
 these are at present : Italian, French , Dutch and German .          speech and language .
 An extension of this project will then further investigate           A specification phase has started and will be followed by
 and implement a system to recognize and understand                   the development of a linguistic processor for high-quality
 continuous speech using advanced techniques in the fields            multi-language text-to-speech conversion systems andfor
 of natural language understanding, computational                     large vocabulary speech recognition systems. The cutter
 linguistics and artificial intelligence.                             shall also provide for error detection and correction in
                                                                      string to be passed.
       'Intelligence and Knowledge Aided Recognition of
                       Speech (IKAROSy
                                                                          Investigation into the Effective Use ofSpeech at the
  Proj. Ref 954 : B/85                                                                 Human- Machine Interface '
  Implementation of a system to recognize and understand              Proj. Ref 449: B/84
  continuous speech , speaker independent and in real time.
                                                                      This project will identify the requirements for effective
  Restricted to a single application and a subset of natural          voice interfaces in particular for CAD/ CAM/CAE work­
  language relevantfor the application .                              stations. The partners are user research associations, end
                                                                      users, and firms that are suppliers in the voice and com­
  Models will be developed to perform an integration of               puterfields.
 prosodic, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge in
  the recognition system .                                             The project results are fundamentalfor a number of other
 ---pagebreak---  No L 365 / 50                          Official Journal of the European Communities                                  31 . 12.85
projects , in particular those dealing with the natural            will be 'objective C \ an object oriented preprocessor jor C
speech and language.                                               which is commercially available and, hence, renders no
                                                                   restriction to the portability of the software products
                                                                   delivered. The work includes a demonstration of docu­
                                                                   ment interchange between different vendor machines and
                                                                   installations, and the development of a common user
       Handling of Mixed Text/Image/ Voice Documents               interface.
  Based on a Standardized Office Document Architecture '
                                                                   Aspects of integrated systems are covered in a number of
 Proj. Ref. 121 : A /83                                            projects, although a fully integrated system approach is
                                                                   not addressed in a project yet.
 Basis for this work is a sophisticated object oriented
 document architecture being standardised up to the first          This project is complementary to project 121 .
 basic level by ECMA , ISO and CCITT. By the project,
 concepts and architectures will be elaborated and verified
 that support the easy and natural processing of docu­
 ments . The project will define and test bridges between                         'Intelligent Workstation ( IWS)'
 the essentially paper-oriented office world and the elec­
 tronic document world of tomorrow, (see also                      Proj. Ref 82 : B/83
 area 4.2.5.(c)).
                                                                    The goal of this project is to provide the office worker
 The initial objective of this project, that will start with a     with an integrated workstation software which can pro­
 specification phase, is to provide in the form of computer        vide sophisticated services ranging from speech and
 data files and of computer method fields coded in high            graphics to expert level decision aids and automated
 level language, the following concerning a number of              report generation . The prototype workstation to be devel­
 European languages :                                              oped will be tested in Denvironmenis providing communi­
                                                                   cation facilities and connected file servers. Much empha­
 dictionary lemmata , flections, grammatical categories :          sis will be laid on the application of methods and soft­
 algorithms and tables for converting the orthographic              ware that aimed at representing knowledge of the office
                                                                   environment .
form into the phonetic one and vice-versa ;
 algorithms and tables for the word stress assignment :
 statistics, ranking lemmata and flections by frequency of
 use :                                                                  'Extended Office Process Migration with Interactive
                                                                                           Panel Displays '
 texts, suitable for extracting further statistical informa­
 tion .
                                                                    Proj. Ref 878 : B/85
  The project results are fundamentalfor a number of other
 projects, in particular those dealing with the natural             In this project a prototype system is to be developed which
 speech and language and will be used in continuation              combines the concept of extended process migration with
 phase where the aim will be to develop a linguistic proces­        a novel panel display device in order to assess and pres­
 sor for high-quality multi-language text-to-speech conver­         ent office activities. Typical office activities consist of
 sion systems and for large vocabulary speech recognition           tasks which are performed in a parallel or sequential
 systems. The cutter shall also provide for error detection         manner by persons in office roles . These activities are
 and correction in string to be passed.                             described formally in order to automate them , where the
                                                                    single tasks are to be performed However where the
                                                                    involvement of human beings introduce non deterministic
 This project is complementary to project 1024.                     elements, these are to be included as exceptions.
                                                                    Extended office process migration covers both the for­
                                                                    mally described flow of work and the handling of excep­
                                                                    tions which occurfrequently, especially in office work. On
    ' Piloting ofthe Office Document Architecture ( PODA )'         the basis of office process migration a prototype of an off­
                                                                    ice system is to be developed as a tool for design , optimi­
 Proj. Ref. 1024 : A /85                                            zation and demonstration of office activities.
  The project is to implement the new ODA standardfor an
  office document architecture under UNIX in an essen­
  tially portable way. A pilot version of the software will be
 ported to one of the hardware products of each manufac­            4.2.3 .  Scope for Further Work
  turer in the consortium . The software to be used is partly
  implemented already in Project 121 . Other parts (essen­           In this area the following topics will be considered for
  tially a syntax driver, adaptableformat checker and trans­        inclusion in call(s) for proposals to be published in
  lator) will be written for this project. The language used         1986 .
 ---pagebreak---  31 . 12 . 85                         Official Journal of the European Communities                            No L 365 / 51
— Vision and Display : In addition to existing projects,         The third topic deals with resource management in a
     a project will be considered that deals with techno­        distributed environment .
     logy integration for the man-machine interface .
— Office languages and procedures : There are 4 pro­             The fourth topic intends to advance the standardiza­
     jects in the office language and procedures subarea         tion of value added communication services in the off­
     covering a broad spectrum already . Nonetheless             ice e.g. in the form of mail box messaging for text,
     this subarea is very wide and important ; work with         image and voice, and for multi-media information sys­
     respect to intelligent user support and office inter­       tems such as advanced videotex .
     face languages emphasizing multi-linguism is parti­
     cularly lacking .
                                                                 Architecture
                                                                 ( a) communication system architectures
                                                                 (b) security in communications
                                                                 (c) harmonization issues in communication
           R&D Area 4.3 : Communication Systems
                                                                 Technology
Office communication presents a number of possible
long lead time research topics . Technological advances          ( a ) optical wideband LAN
are needed in microelectronics and in fibre optics, and          (b) advanced switching techniques
research is necessary on the principles of future com­
munication systems such as wideband local area net­
works ( LAN), the interconnection of LAN 's and the               Resource management
gateway facilities for multimode functionality . R&D              (a) distributed systems
should lead to new systems and to standards consistent
with the ISO reference model for open systems inter­
connection (OSI). Besides these technical problems,               Services
there are non-technical problem areas which have to be
                                                                  (a) multi-mode messaging
addressed in order to support the progress of office
communication systems . The requirements of office                (b) ISDN-based advanced videotex
communication have to be explored more systemati­                 (c) teleconferencing
cally to get a more solid basis for future telecommuni­
cation system design . The special aspects of human               (d) advanced services
interface with communication have to be studied , and
the future relationship of the PTTs to new local com­
munication systems has to be considered . New lan­
guages and operating system facilities are necessary in          4.3.2.    Current Projects and Projects Under Negotiation
connection with distributed systems .
                                                                      Broad Site Local Wideband Communication System '
4.3.1 .    Topics
                                                                 Proj. Ref 73 : A /83
Within this scope of possible research activities , four          This project is concerned with the research and develop­
main topics which cover some key issues have been                ment of a local area wideband communication system for
determined .
                                                                 broad sites . The prototype system developed will meet the
                                                                 anticipated future communication requirements of large
The first topic is dedicated to the fundamental question         industrial, scientific and administrative organisations.
— how to provide a common communication system                    The project will take into account data , text, voice and
for all office communication needs . This question               graphics communication needs , and it will provide back­
becomes more and more urgent, since non-voice com­               bone networks and gatewaysfor heterogeneous LA Ns.
munication will be needed at almost every desk in the
future and video communication is on its way.
The second topic addresses the wide band LAN ,
including the application of optical fibres, and all the                    'Communications Systems Architectures '
technological problems related to this . It is also con­
cerned with the role of switched communication in the             Proj. Ref 237: A /84
office      It addresses
                .        the problems of advancing from
current single service switching techniques towards               The emphasis of the project is on the development of new
multiservice variable bandwidth switching which will             architectures for the interconnection of terminals and
 allow the interconnection of all office peripherals and         resources in an integrated multi-service environment. The
resources .                                                      network developed in this project will reflect the open
 ---pagebreak---  No L 365 / 52                          Official Journal of the European Communities                                     31 . 12 . 85
 systems policy by providing interfaces following OSI              systems and networks. To achieve this, the project is to
 standards .                                                       study thefollowing areas :
                                                                   — overall architecture characteristics of a networking
A top down approach is proposed in three phases:                        gateway ;
 Phase one will identify the needs for communication by            — the functional definition of a networking gateway
analysis of user requirements. A logical model of com­                  (including performance and connectivity goals), and
munication will be developed. A proposal will be made for               a formalized approach to design an architecture of
 the integration of a distributed operating system within               such a gateway ;
 the open system structure.
                                                                   — implementation-oriented issues (e.g. hardware/soft ­
 Phase two will develop the physical architecture by map­                ware split, suitable technologies), and a formalized
ping the logical model from phase one onto actual com­                   approach to the transformation of specifications into
 munication technology.                                                  implementations and on to parallel hardware;
 Phase three will be the development of those system ele­          — performance analysis of proposed architectures, spe­
 ments identified in phase two to achieve a pilot network                cifications and implementations ;
 demonstration . The pilot network will be benchmarked
for performance to evaluate system design decisions in             — Rapid prototyping of designs using hardware/soft ­
phase two.                                                               ware trade-offs as appropriate .
  'An Integrated Network Architecture for Office Commun­
                            ications '                                       'Local Integrated Optical Network (LION)'
 Proj. Ref. 395 : A /84                                            Prof Ref. 169 : A /83
  The project is to design and define an architecture for off­     The LION project is implementing a wideband local area
 ice communications, and to demonstrate a pilot imple­             network based on optical fibre technology, with major
                                                                   application in the office environment, including such
 mentation . The architecture will be capable of including
                                                                   applications in industrial research laboratories, universi­
 all types of local and wide area networks, such as optical
                                                                   ties, hospitals and manufacturing plants. The LION will
 LANs, CATV broadband networks, PABXs, packet­
 switched networks and the emerging integrated services            guarantee multiple access to a number of independent
 digital network ( ISDN).                                          users with the requirements of distributed processing and
                                                                   distributed intelligence, and handle voice, data, text and
                                                                   video traffic.     Very high bit rates are foreseen , requiring
  The integrated architecture will be demonstrated in a            new technologies in integrated optics and very high speed
pilot integrated network including the broadband network           electronic components.
 and a variety of other available local and wide area net­
 works, and linking the project partners ' sites. The demon­
 strated applications will include an enhanced version of
 the document handling environment.
                                                                    ' TALON — Testing and Analysis of Local Area Network
                                                                                           Optical Networks '
  'Standardisation of Integrated LAN Services and Service          Proj. Ref. 870: B/85
                       Access Protocols '
                                                                   A special task (TALON) is aimed at providing solid tech­
 Pioj. Ref 43 : B/83                                               nical and commercial philosophyfor testing complex opti­
                                                                   cal LA Ns. It supports and complements communications
 The aim of the project is to define the services to be prov­      system design activities. Many of the currently estab­
 ided by an integrated traffic LAN and to define a stable,         lished methods for testing point-to-point optical fibre
 LAN-technology independent interface between DTE                  links are ineffective when applied to complex optical
 and LAN access unit. This interface will comprise the             topologies. The sub-project will build demonstrators and
physical interface and the service access protocols by             evaluate their effectiveness in different environments.
 means of which (he services can be used.
                                                                   This project is complementary to project 169 .
    Parallel Architecturefor Networking Gateways Linking
                  OSI Systems (PA NGLOSS) '
                                                                               ' Ultra Wideband Coherent Optical LAN '
 Proj. Ref 890: B/85
                                                                   Proj. Ref. 249: B/84
  This project is to build a prototype high-performance net­
 working gateway using a highly-parallel architecture in            The project will investigate the feasibility of utilising
 order to meet the anticipated demand for linking OS I             coherent optical techniques in a local area network by
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                            Official Journal of the European Communities                            No L 365/53
addressing both technical and system issues. It will con­          4.3.3 .  Scope for Further Work
sider new machine architectures to implement high band­
width transmissions of order of several Gbits/sec for
different types of information including voice, text and           In this area multi-mode messaging services will be con­
image .                                                            sidered for inclusion in call(s) for proposals to be pub­
                                                                   lished in 1986 .
        Dynamically Adaptable Multi-Service Switch '
                                                                      R&D Area 4.4 : Advanced Multi-Media Storage and
                                                                                        Retrieval Systems
Proj. Ref 1059 : B/85
This project intends to identify and exploit the relative          Information technology and office automation are fun­
advantages of a switch oriented communication architec­            damentally concerned with the storage, accessing and
ture with respect to the wide variety of traffic and services      movement of information , covering data, text, graphics,
necessary to the office. The project includes a require­           voice, images and other forms . Investigations leading
ment study, an advanced design and technology investig­            to the definition of an advanced data-base model for
ation, a partial prototype sufficient to illustrate the princi­    office applications and studies of the security, privacy,
ple and also alternative architectural principles including        authority of access and information distribution are
the concept of bandwidth switching. Geographic location            fundamental to a wide range of office systems research .
of terminals will be also considered and the traffic gener­
ated and the performance required by a future office
communication system .                                             The proposed research is oriented toward construction
                                                                   of a number of experimental prototype office informa­
                                                                   tion servers, and the operation of these in realistic
                                                                   conditions, alone and in association with each other, to
                                                                   gain practical experience in the systems implications of
    'Construction and Management of Distributed Office             building these servers, loading them with practical
                  Systems (COMANDOS)'                              information and using them in a realistic way.
                                                                   The work is therefore divided into three general classes :
Proj. Ref. 834 : A /85
                                                                   systems issues, usage and needs, and components .
 The main goal of this work is the creation of an efficient
and easy to use environment of the development and                 Systems issues : these cover the design and operation of
management of distributed applications. To meet this               office information servers, including high-performance
objective combinations of advances and the state of the            filters and investigations of new information models
art of different technologies will be applied to innovative        and the development of metrics relating to these .
and general tools. The approach will allowfor the specific         Servers must be considered in relation to the other
characteristics of different distributed office information        components of a comprehensive office system includ­
systems .                                                          ing other information servers and the distribution of
                                                                   information and functions between them . Work on the
                                                                   filing interface-related aspects of query languages and
                                                                   declarative content languages is identified .
    'Multipoint Interactive Audio- Visual Communication
                           (MIAC)'                                 Usage and needs : this topic addresses the nature of the
                                                                   information (data, text, graphics, images etc . . .) that
                                                                   will be held in office information servers in terms of
Proj. Ref. 1057: B/85                                              quality, quantity and combination and the usage of
                                                                   that information . An internal adaptive interface is to be
                                                                   investigated, that responds to the needs and experience
 This project will develop and demonstrate a system for            of users .
the simultaneous communication of speech , visual and
data forms of information between persons at two, three
or more, at widely separated locations, using ISDN and             Components : the development of hardware, software
other 64 Kbit/s networks. The demonstration itself will            and systems elements that will be incorporated into
be a multipoint international audioconference system               advanced filing systems, primarily in information serv­
with visual and office-system aids, but the signal and pro­        ers, but also in advanced workstations. These include
tocol infrastructure developed will be applicable to a wide        filters, the systems management issues relating to using
range of other audiovisual services. This infrastructure           optical discs in advanced office systems, the systems
developed will be applicable to a wide range of other              techniques required to achieve very high perceived reli­
audiovisual services .                                             ability, and the application of advanced information
 ---pagebreak---   No L 365 / 54                          Official Journal of the European Communities                                   31 . 12 . 85
 processing techniques to advanced filing and retrieval               'Design and Operational Evaluation ofDistributed Office
 systems .                                                                                 Information Servers '
                                                                     Proj. Ref 231 : A /84
 4.4.1 . Topics
                                                                     The objective of the project is to design , demonstrate and
 The topics covered by this R&D area include :                      then evaluate a family of working prototype office
                                                                    information servers capable of holding in digital elec­
                                                                     tronic form representations of all office information cur­
  File server architectures i.e.
                                                                     rently committed to paper. A global model will be estab­
 (a ) office information server design and evaluation                lished both for the information held in the servers and the
 ( b ) very high security systems                                   functions needed to manipulate and manage it. Key to
                                                                     the project is the consideration of the issues involved in
                                                                     distributed information , architecture and use in the office
 System issues i.e.                                                  environment. Two major demonstrations of the capabili­
                                                                     ties of Office Information Servers are planned during the
 (a) new information models                                         project. A pilot demonstration at the end ofyear 3 and a
 (b ) file query and declarative content languages                   main demonstration at the end of year 4. A full year is
                                                                     then availablefor a full evaluation of the system .
 Usage and needs i.e.
 ( a) nature and usage of filed information                          An extension to the initial project will then investigate
                                                                     and report on the usability and performance issues deriv­
 (b ) user-file adaptive interface                                   ing from the operation of a distributed set of information
 ( c) performance of office information servers                      servers which collectively support a fully integrated ser­
                                                                     vice. It will also implement and evaluate two configura­
                                                                     tions :
 Components i.e
 (a ) file filters                                                   — 'Logical server ' — a set of 'unit servers ' (one proces­
 (b ) optical storage systems concepts
                                                                          sor) on a single site, behaving as a single entity to the
                                                                          user .
                                                                     — 'Global service ' — made up of several Logical serv­
                                                                          ers ', distributed geographically .
 4 .4 . 2 . Current Projects and Projects Under Negotiation
                   'A Multimedia Filing System '                      'New information modelsfor Office Filing and Retrieval '
 Proj. Ref 28 : A / 83
                                                                     Proj. Ref. 59: A /83
 The goal of this project is to develop a system that pro­
vides filing services for multimedia documents using                 The project deals with research into new information
magnetic and optical storage media . Particular attention           models for office filing and retrieval. The emphasis will
will be paid to the needs of the office environment. The            be on research of the theoretical issues of a model which
system will be implemented on a dedicated server that               characterises alljbrms of office information . A number of
accepts requests from clients such as workstations or               models will be developed and related to techniques offil­
other devices. The units of communication between server            ing and retrieval of information .
and client will be multimedia documents rather than
physical records or blocks.
                                                                     Many key problems are being investigated, the majority
                                                                     of these dealing with aspects of human acceptability, or
 The services provided by the server are those traditionally         more precisely : speed and accural eness of the retrieval
found in an information retrieval or database environ­              process for the skilled and unskilled user.
ment. However, ihe dual demands of a multimedia capa­
bility and application to offices introduce research issues .        The models developed will be constructed and validated
 The server will be implemented by increments. The first             in a software environment which emulates the interaction
prototype will deal with text and attribute data only, sub­          of an office filing and retrieval system .
sequent versions will add image and voice data .
 The global design has now been completed and work is                The schema architecture has been produced together with
 underway on the functional specifications of system                the sketch of the user interface. Work continues with
 components including the server subsystem and the user             work on querying, storage structure, and aspects of sys­
 interface.                                                         tem security.
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                             Official Journal of the European Communities                              No L 365 / 55
     'A General Public Data, Voice and Picture Storage              tem prototypes, that allow qualitative and quantitative
                       Retrieval System '                           validation in a variety of simulated offices and enter­
                                                                    prises . This work would also use the products of
Proj. Ref. 901 : B/85                                               area 4.1 as well as other standards, performance and
                                                                    integration work.
This project is to create extremely large multi-media data
and image base. It will be made widely available for use            Second : the design, development and evaluation of
by the general public. It intends to demonstrate the feasi­         advanced office system prototypes, based upon state-­
bility of such a system , and includes : development of a           of-the-art components developed in Europe, possibly
new laser vision system combining analog and discutely              under the ESPRIT programme (area 4.2 to 4.4), and
coded information and a multi-media database retreival              based upon the results of structured analysis in the off­
system including a 'major walking ' interface to geograph­          ice systems science and human factors areas (area 4.1 ).
ical information . Design of the system will allow access
by means of widely available, low cost workstations.
Particular emphasis is given to a very easy to handle user
interface that will make use of knowledge engineering               4.5.1 .   Topics
techniques.
                                                                    The topics to be studied in this area include :
                                                                     Information system architecture
4.4.3 .    Scope for Further Work
                                                                    ( a ) system architectures
In this area the following topic will be considered for             (b) systems security.
inclusion in call(s) for proposals to be published in
                                                                    Test and evaluation
1986 : multi-media storage and retrieval system usage
and needs .                                                         (a) office system test and evaluation facilities
                                                                    ( b ) office systems application test beds.
   R & D area 4.5 : Integrated Office Information Systems
                                                                     4.5.2 .   Current Projects and Projects Under Negotiation
The research and the prototype development of compo­
nents for office systems has to be supplemented by the                                   Office Systems Security '
research and evaluation of integrated office systems
concepts for a variety of office environments . In an                Proj. Ref. 998 : B/85
industrial R & D programme the testing of prototypes,
against requirements that are representative for market              The project deals with all security aspects of information
conditions, is the most important check on the relev­                systems in an integrated way. It is defined in three
ance of the research done .                                         phases :
                                                                     — assessment of the state-of-the-art, including require­
                                                                           ments and solutions in such highly sensitive areas as
 The architecture for distributed systems is a major area                  the military and process control.
 of concern . Distribution of functional units networked
 together can be considered the fundamental concept                  — development of a security modelfor information sys­
                                                                           tems .
 not only for office systems , but for all future informa­
 tion systems . Elaboration and implementation of this               — specification of security measures and elaboration of
 concept is by no means trivial , and requires many new                    implementation guidelines.
 ideas and the development of reference models and
 standards . A particular aspect, system security, should
 be considered throughout the design process on the
 total system level as well as on component level .                      'Advanced Information System for Public Administra­
                                                                                             tions (ASTRA )'
 Two topics are identified in the subarea Test and                   Proj. Ref 831 : A /85
 evaluation that are complementary but not necessarily
 mutually dependent .                                                ASTRA will provide facilities for testing and evaluating
                                                                     office information systems. The project consists of two
                                                                     phases : in the first phase an analysis of very large public
  First : the creation ot test - and evaluation environments         administrations in four participating countries will be
 for office system components and integrated office sys              made with regard to information handling. The second
 ---pagebreak---   No L 365 / 56                         Official Journal of the European Communities                                 31 . 12 . 85
phase will provide two prototypes which are split on sub­          tions of both prototypes in two different countries. The
jects of size, complexity, system architecture and costs           results of the project will be available for the PAs of
 into                                                              European Member States.
 (i)    a high level prototype, dealing with large amounts
        ofdata and
 (ii)   a low level prototype, dealing with the multifunc­         4.5.3 .  Scope for Further Work
        tional aspects of office automation .
                                                                   In this area the following topics will be considered for
  These prototypes will make use of advanced storage and           inclusion in call(s ) for proposals to be published in
 retrieval systems based on optical discs. Finally an eval­         1986 : Information systems architecture, Test and
 uation of the second phase will result in test implementa­        evaluation facilities and Application test beds .
                                                     SUBPROGRAMME 5 :
                                       COMPUTER INTEGRATED MANUFACTURE
  5.0 .  Introduction                                               5.2 .  CAD / CAE
                                                                    5.3 . Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM )
  This area relates to the total range of manufacturing
  activities including computer aided design (CAD),                 5.4. Flexible Manufacturing Systems
  computer aided engineering (CAE), computer aided                  5.5 . Subsystems and Components
  manufacturing (CAM), flexible machining and                       5.6. CIM System Applications
  assembly systems, robotics, testing and quality control .
  The area has been selected for its potential impact on
  the methods and economies of production , which are
  strongly geared to success for the IT industries, and for
  manufacturing industry in general .
                                                                          R&D area 5.1 : Integrated Systems Architectures
  The objectives in CIM are to create an environment in
  which multi-vendor systems can be implemented in a                In the next decade, one can expect that a wide variety
  progressive manner, and in which Community IT sup­                of CIM systems will be implemented within manufac­
  pliers can compete effectively. To achieve this, effort           turing industry. To be effective, each system must serve
  will be concentrated in two main streams. Firstly, work           its specific application in an optimum manner. In order
  is needed on infrastructures, which concentrates on the           to remain competitive and to preserve flexibility, effec­
  development of design rules and architectures leading             tive design methods for CIM must be developed so that
  to a common reference frame . Relevant international              new technologies can be exploited as they become
  standards activity must be continuously assessed, and             available. At present, there are some guidelines but no
  areas identified in which European action could be                international standards available for the design of sys­
  supported . The second stream involves action on those            tems architectures for CIM .
  sub-systems, interfaces and tools whose development
  or refinement is judged to be of strategic value for
  European Community industry (both users and ven­                  New and innovative conceptual approaches are
  dors).                                                            required in order to fit appropriate systems architec­
                                                                    tures to the total manufacturing process from initial
   In order to stimulate and facilitate the transfer of new         product development, product design , production plan­
   information technology concepts to the engineering               ning and control , real time control of production
  industries within the Community, application centres              equipment, materials handling, through to inventory
  will be encouraged to provide an important focus for              control and sales . To support the total systems
   the coordination of effort and the exchange of informa­          approach , it is necessary to develop strategies for data,
   tion among the various and sometimes disparate parts             communications, and processing, which address both
   of the CIM R&D programme.                                        physical and logical requirements. Systems architec­
                                                                    tures for CIM should be open, so as to avoid market
   Six R&D areas are described :
                                                                    domination by any one vendor, and to allow users
                                                                    maximum freedom of choice in their selection of sub­
  5.1 . Integrated Systems Architectures                            systems .
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                           Official Journal of the European Communities                               No L 365 / 57
The resources needed to define open systems architec­             — capability for progressive implementation ,           with
tures, and the market strength necessary to gain accept­                  special attention to the needs of SMEs.
ance of these, are beyond the reach of all but the largest
and most influential organizations . However, the desir­          — applicability across a wide spectrum of industry.
ability of developing a reference model , which would
allow users to develop multi-vendor CIM systems is
readily apparent. This is an area where the potential for
significant advances through a unified approach is
high , and it is therefore particularly suitable for effort       5 . 1 .3 .  Scope for Further Work
on a Community scale .
                                                                  This area is well-covered by existing work and is
                                                                  unlikely to be considered for inclusion in call(s) for
                                                                  proposals to be published in 1986.
5.1.1 .   Topics
— the definition and development of open systems                        R & D area 5.2 : Computer Aided Design/Computer
     architectures that would be applicable in a range of                                 Aided Engineering
     manufacturing environments ;
                                                                  The importance of CAD /CAE is that it :
— implement these architectures in real manufactur­
     ing environments                                             — reduces the design time and facilitates optimization
                                                                          of the design, of products and processes,
                                                                  — facilitates storage of all relevant aspects of design,
                                                                          and rapid update and retrieval of information ,
5.1.2 .   Current Projects and Projects Under Negotiation
                                                                  — generates data which are used by the whole manu­
                                                                          facturing process including robot and machine tool
Preliminary work completed in pilot projects provides                     programmes .
a useful basis for this and other areas of ESPRIT CIM .
A book entitled ' Design Rules for a CIM System ',                — provides feedback from the manufacturing process
editors : R.W. Yeomans, A. Choudry, P.J.W. ten Hagen ,                    to the design team which allows a more versatile
is already available . A further publication , covering                   and economic operation .
design rules for the integration of robots into CIM , is
scheduled for publication in 1986 .
                                                                  Modular structures for CAD/ CAE subsystems ( which
                                                                  include generalized 3D-modellers, geometrical design
The current project in this area is :                             systems, engineering computational programs , simula­
                                                                  tion programs ) are needed in order to give the designer
                                                                  access to different software packages and data bases .
                                                                  Such systems must be able to supply data that are readily
                                                                  usable for all interacting engineering and production
  'AMICE, A European Computer Integrated Manufactur­              activities, as well as good display quality and
                      ing Architecture '                          capabilities . Increasingly these systems have to support
                                                                  disparate and geographically dispersed organizations
                                                                  cooperating in the design process of a complex end
Proj. Kef 688 : B/84                                              product .
 It is intended to define and develop Open Systems
                                                                  To encourage the wider use of CIM systems by reduc­
Architectures for CIM, to support present and future
                                                                  ing the risk of failure, methods should be developed to
 needs. Design criteria for the architectures include :
                                                                  allow the representation , specification and testing of
                                                                  proposed systems prior to installation .
— openness, i.e. the creation of an environment in
      which multi-vendor systems can be supported. In this
     context , the architectures will be ISO-OSI com­              Unless very strong reasons can be shown , all projects in
                                                                  area 5.2 should be consistent with relevant architectures
     patible .
                                                                  developed in area 5.1 . The interaction of CAD/CAE
                                                                  with CAM ( 5.3 ) and FMS ( 5.4 ) systems must also be
— protection of existing investment — i.e. , migration            taken into account, and techniques under development
     paths will be identified from present to future imple­       in other areas of ESPRIT must be continuously
      mentations .                                                reviewed .
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 / 58                           Official Journal of the European Communities                                  31 . 12 . 85
5.2 . 1 .    Topics                                                the Al-based advanced high-level modelling interface.
                                                                    The first part of the work has been completed with an
CAD/ CAE facilities for product and process design                 analysis of the existing CAD/CAM interface standards
                                                                   and the establishment of procedures for exchanging
Adaptation or development of tools and subsystems to               models between CAD systems. Testing has been carried
                                                                   out of high level data transfer between MEDUSA and
support integrated C AD/ CAE activities , e.g. :
                                                                    BRA VO. The design and implementation of these inter­
— product design activities such as project manage­                faces will be closely coordinated with international stan­
       ment, concept design , preliminary design , analysis         dardization activity in this area .
       and simulation , final design , product documenta­
       tion management, product configuration manage­
       ment .
— process design activities such as process selection ,                'Development ofan Integrated Process and Operations
        process modelling, process planning, process plan             Planning System with the Use of Interactive 3D Modell­
        simulation , process plan optimization , process                                    ing Technology '
        quality assurance planning,
— tools specific to different classes of products and               Proj. Ref. 409: B/84
        processes, and to 'group technologies' concepts
        (geometry, dimensions, materials, tolerances,                The objective is to develop an interactive graphics-based
        process operations type).                                   system for process and operation planning within a manu­
                                                                   facturing environment. To reduce development costs, the
 Use of AI techniques in C AD/CAE                                   overall system will be built from existing and proven sys­
                                                                    tem components of the project partners. The approach
— review developments in artificial intelligence which              will be to achieve a uniform user interface for CA D and
        might be applicable to CAD/ CAE . Carry out                 CAM-systems and secondly to provide a complete simu­
        development work in appropriate areas .                     lation of the manufacturing process .
— graphics tools to support management and supervi­
         sory activity in manufacturing environments .
                                                                     'Design and specification ofconfigurable graphics subsys­
 Graphics systems                                                                             tem for CIM '
 — to aid decision-making at management and super­
          visory levels .                                           Proj. Ref 496: B/84
                                                                    The project has two primary goals :
                                                                    1.     The identification and classification of the differing
5 .2 .2 .    Current Projects and Projects Under Negotiation               requirements for graphics in the many areas of CIM.
                                                                    2.     The development of software/hardware prototype
 'Knowledge and Decision Support for Material Handling                     graphics subsystems that meet the requirements of I.
                                                                           above .
                             Systems '
                                                                           The first goal has been achieved, the partners have
Proj. Ref 293 : B /84                                                      carried out an exploratory survey covering hardware,
                                                                           software, and man-machine interface requirements
 The project is investigating the applicability of expert                 for graphics of CIM systems and delivered the study
systems for decision support and will develop a know­                      report. To attain the second goal, the partners are
ledge base for modelling material handling systems. The                    currently preparing the design specifications of the
objectives are to analyse and define the knowledge neces­                  prototype graphics subsystem and a set of design
sary to achieve valid assessments for system designs and
                                                                           standards based on the use of the Graphics Kernel
of system operation . The knowledge will be implemented
                                                                           System ( GKS) and the Ada programming language.
in decision support systems and would be used by engi­
neers planning a material handling system .
                                                                        ' VITAMIN: Visualisation Tools and Modelling Stan­
                                                                                   dards in Manufacturing Industry "
                          CAD Interfaces '                          Proj. Ref. 1038 : B/85
Proj. Ref. 322 : A /84                                               The project aims to produce a set of graphical visualiza­
                                                                    tion tools , based on modelling standards with the objec­
 This project concentrates on important interfaces of               tive of improving decision-making in production manage­
CAD/CAM systems : the CAD data exchange interface ,                 ment . A wide range of essential management information
the CAD data base interface, the interface to finite                will be addressed, such as business, marketing, produc­
element analysis and dynamic model optimization , and               tion management and production monitoring.
 ---pagebreak---  31 . 12 . 85                              Official Journal of the European Communities                             No L 365 / 59
 5.2.3 .    Scope for Further Work                                     with various levels of automation . As implementation
                                                                      proceeds, a new flexible machining cell, consisting of a
 The topics ' use of AI techniques ' and 'graphics                    group oj machine tools, measuring machines, materials
 systems ' will be considered in call(s) for proposals to             buffering equipment and feeder robots will be incorpor­
 be published in 1986.                                                ated into the system . The wider applications are relevant
                                                                      to the project 477. Liaison is being maintained between
                                                                      the two consortia for the mutual benefit of interchanging
                                                                      technical information .
  R&D area 5.3 : Computer-Aided Manufacturing ( CAM)
 A computer-aided manufacturing system in this con­                       'Control Systems for Integrated Manufacturing : the
 text addresses the real-time management of factory                                           CA M Solution '
 operations . A CAM system acts as a high integrity
 information network that monitors a broad spectrum of                Proj. Kef. 477: A /84
 interrelated activities in the manufacturing cycle and
 asserts consequent control on the basis of an overall                 The project is focused on production activity control
 management strategy .                                                (PAC), the role of which is to close the loop between prod­
                                                                      uction planning and execution . The results will be
                                                                      especially applicable to small batch manufacturing envi­
 Design aims of a CAM system should include :                         ronments. The goal of the project is to design , develop
 (i )     maximizing assistance to human supervision in               and test the software modules required to close the con­
          overall factory operations and in individual pro­           trol loop, reducing human intervention and reaction time
          cesses ;                                                    as much as possible, and relying on data automatically
 (ii )    processes to be individually programmable ;                 capturedfrom the plant.
 (iii)    compatibility with systems architectures defined
          in 5.1 ;                                                    The first phase is underway, with groups analyzing three
                                                                      related areas :
 (iv)     possibility for introducing modifications and
          extensions without violating total systems con­
          cept .                                                            Process :   Analysis of manufacturing facilities and
                                                                                        selection for the implementation of a
                                                                                        suitable site.
                                                                      — Control:        Theoretical modelling for planning and
 5.3.1 .    Topics                                                                      scheduling the PAC system .
— define and develop CAM systems in a range of                        — Software :      Investigation and analysis of suitable
       industrial environments ;                                                        software tools and techniques required
                                                                                       for the system .
— apply innovative concepts as they become avail­
       able .
                                                                      Technical liaison      is   also   being  maintained   with
                                                                      project 418.
 5.3.2 .    Current Projects and Projects Under Negotiation
                                                                           'Knowledge Based Real Time Supervision in CIM '
     'Open CAM System allowing modular integration into               Proj. Ref. 932 : A /85
factory management ofa workshop structure in functional
              cells with various levels ofautomation '
                                                                      The project has 2 main objectives :
 Proj. Ref. 418 : A /84
                                                                      — The design and implementation of a knowledge­
                                                                            based real time development system oriented to a
 The purpose of the project is to develop a CAM System                      number of CIM application tasks .
 with an open architecture. This CAM system will be
 applicable to machine as well as assembly activities.                — The installation and evaluation oj the system at two
 Although the system is targetted at a specific manufac­                   dissimilar industrial plants.
 turing environment, the implementation methodologies
 and tools evolved in the course of the project are appli­
 cable to a diverse range of manufacturing environments.              The functionality of the system will be demonstrated by
 The system will be implemented in two pilot shops ( mach­            addressing the problems of real-time interpretation of
 ine shop and assembly shop), consisting of several cells             plant data for fault diagnosis : action planning by
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 /60                          Official Journal of the European Communities                                   31 . 12 . 85
intelligent alarm handling and providing operator support         Automated assembly
data : optimization of throughput , economy and flexibility       — computer automated assembly systems ;
oj operation .
                                                                  — robot systems .
                                                                  Plant availability and quality optimization
5.3.3 .   Scope for Further Work                                  — basic plant diagnosis technology ;
                                                                  — diagnosis formulation ;
This area is well covered by existing work and is
unlikely to be considered for inclusion in call(s) for            — action planning ;
proposals to be published in 1986 .                               — automated quality control and inspection .
                                                                  Advanced control systems and concepts
                                                                  — specification         of computing      requirements       for
                                                                        subsystem control ;
      R&D area 5.4 : Flexible Manufacturing Systems
                                                                  — incorporation of Advanced Information Processing
                                                                        ( AIP) for work in system control packages .
For industries specializing in the manufacture of a
wide variety of parts in low and medium volumes , the
development of highly flexible , high productivity sys­
tems is an important goal . The major task of the sup­
pliers of CIM equipment is to enhance the technology
required for flexible automation .
                                                                  5.4.2 .    Current Projects and Projects Under Negotiation
Machining centres for automatic machining of metal
parts , systems for automatic loading and unloading of
workpieces, and conveyor systems for automatically
transferring workpieces from one machining process to                 ' The Integration of Welded Fabrication within CIM
another, are already available from many sources . A
problem which still has to be attacked is the integration
of machining centres into overall CIM systems , with              Prof Rej 595 : A /84
proper acknowledgement of human factors .
                                                                  The project work is in the area of the development of
Further development is required in the area of auto­              sub-systems and control frameworks for the application
mated assembly systems, and to enhance the capability             of welded fabrication in CIM. A coordinated programme
of robots beyond the simple operations at present car­            is being carried out in which methods will be developed
ried out . Major benefits would be obtained if effective         for generating, structuring, storing, and manipulating
communication with the design process could be                    control and output data at all stages of the fabrication
achieved . It is also necessary to take advantage of             process . To enable an integrated development approach ,
developments in Advanced Information Processing                   the project will concentrate on a specific industrial sector
(AIP), and simulation systems .                                   and limited product range and the area chosen is ship­
                                                                  building. However, results generated in this project will
Research and development are also needed to reach                 have a much wider application within fabrication indus­
two of the principal , and often conflicting, goals of all        tries, and the rules for integration developed in this pro­
future automated plants, namely maintenance of con­              ject will be applicable to the automation of other fabrica­
sistently high product quality and maximum plant                  tion processes, e.g. high energy electron beam welding,
availability .                                                    laser welding and friction welding.
                                                                  Initially work concentrated in five main areas :
5.4 . 1 . Topics
                                                                  — Design studies : the definition ofproduct modularisa­
                                                                         tion . standardization , code requirement and fitness
                                                                        for purpose.
 Flexible manufacturing systems
                                                                  — CIM Architecture/Software               development :      the
— specification for interfaces between automatic                         development of simulation software for resource allo­
       equipment :                                                       cation and line scheduling. In addition inventory
       definition of FMS systems architecture and subsys­                management , robot simulation software is being
       tems ;                                                           produced.
— define and implement pilot FMS in testbed envi­                 — Welding System Automation : procedural data han­
       ronment .                                                         dling and real time control of robot welding.
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                          Official Journal of the European Communities                              No L 365 /61
— Quality Assurance : aspects of data processing and              a study of the applicability of the technology to future
      shop floor monitoring.                                      manufacturing. The human factors are concerned with
                                                                  work organisation and job design within the cell, skill lev­
— Production Cell Development : This will be the basis            els, supervision , quality assurance, maintenance and
      of an experimental system employing the hardware            training issues and a study of the involvement of
      and software developed in the other areas.                  engineers and scientists in planning for human needs in
                                                                  the cell 's operation .
 The project will continue to work towards these goals,
ultimately in producing specifications for at least two
advanced fabrication facilities incorporating CIM princi­
ples.
                                                                    ' Operational Control for Robot System Integration into
                                                                                              CIM '
 'Integrated Information Processingfor Design , Planning          Proj. Ref 623 : A/83-84
                  and Control ofAssembly '
                                                                  The project is directed to improving the integration of
Proj. Ref. 384 : A /84                                           robots into computer integrated manufacturing ( CIM)
                                                                 systems . Based on the design rules and the development
                                                                 paths derived in the pilot phase of ESPRIT (Ref. PP. 75)
This project is aimed at demonstrating the principle of an        the project will establish automated integration facilities
integrated process for design , planning and control of          for the operational areas of planning and programming.
small hatch assemblies . The emphasis of the project is on       A prototype of a computer aided planning system for a
defining and automatically assembling the product,                typical industrial application , and an improved CAD
rather than on the manufacture of the piece parts . The           Robot linkage to be implemented. This will use an off­
project also aims to demonstrate the concept of an inte­          line programming system specially designed for robots .
grated system for the complete assembly process includ­           Graphical simulation requirements to aid robot planning
ing design planning , scheduling and control aspects , con­       and programming as a basic tool of the system will be
sidering all interdepcndencies and feedbacks from related         analysed and implemented. A data management strategy
assembly objects and processes .                                  will be derived to link the robot application into the CIM
                                                                 framework . The possibilities for using 41 techniques for
                                                                  robotic applications, including implicit programming
Current work has focussed on expert systems and simula­           methods , will be investigated and methods for simulation
tion tools with attention to the existing systems for             identified.
design , planning and scheduling an important precursor
to the demonstrators in these areas .
                                                                       'A Systems Technologyfor Optimising the Tradeoffs
                                                                    between Plant Availability, Product Quality and Safety '
  'Development ofa Flexible Automated Assembly Cell and
              associated Human Factors Study '                     Proj. Ref. 504 : B/84
Proj. Ref. 534 : A /84                                             This project is directed to the development of a systems
                                                                  technology for automating the management of a discrete
                                                                 parts manufacturing plant . It will be based on maximiz­
 The project is directed to the evaluation and the develop­       ing their availability, product quality and safety. A high
 ment of a programmable flexible automated assembly              percentage of the proposed R&D effort relates to the
cell for mechanical objects of typically 0.5 m3 size.             on-line processing of plant machinery health , tool
Although the concept is based upon the needs of an                performance, product quality and safety data . The ena­
 intended user, the project includes an assessment of the         bling technologies include signal processing, expert sv.v­
 application of the system to industry generally . The            tems, system modelling , action planning, sensor network
project comprises five technological and two human fac­           and computer system design .
 tor sub areas.
                                                                    Work has been carried out reviewing available technol­
 The technological areas are the use of robots with various        ogy in this field and the preparation of a suitable demon­
other devices, including software development , the               strator which is now providing live data from machining
development of integrated sensors for robotic vision and          operations to facilitate the development ofprocess models
optical data processing, the development of contactless            to allow diagnosis, action planning and failure recovering
inspection including integration , systems integration and        routines to be developed.
 ---pagebreak---                                       t
No L 365 /62                           Official Journal of the European Communities                                    31 . 12.85
   DASIQ : Distributed Automated System for Inspection            — microelectronic sub-systems for the control of
                    and Quality Control '                                machines, robots and assembly systems on special­
                                                                         ized VLSI chips.
Proj. Ref. 1136 : B/85
 The project is directed at the research and experimental
application of a new distributed system, DASIQ, for               5.5.2 .     Current Projects and Projects under Negotiation
inspection and quality control. Hie work is particularly
aimed at the development and integration of optical
inspection techniques for the assessment of surface finish              'Exploitation of Real-time Imagingfor Arc Welding '
and dimensional control. The DASIQ system will be inte­
grated with the factory CAD/CAM systems for optimiza­
tion of design-manufacturing processes.                           Proj. Ref. 9: A /83
                                                                  In the first year of this project the following tasks were
       Advanced Control Real Time CIM Systems and                 carried out :
              Conceptsfor Flexible Automation '
                                                                  — an analysis of potential industrial arc welding tasks,
Proj. Ref. 809 : B /85                                                    which has resulted in the selection of candidate sen­
                                                                         sing applications in thin section/high production rate
This project intends to develop and implement a real-time                 and thick section/high quality sectors.
intelligent CIM system . Based on computing requirement
                                                                  — a survey of image analysis methods and applications.
specifications,  the emphasis is on hierarchical control
structures . Simulations of multiple manufacturing system         — a study of image acquisition and processing
configurations will be conducted in order to assess the                   approaches which would be applicable to the testbed
adaptability of the system .                                              sensing applications selected in thefirst phase.
                                                                  — a definition of the possibilities for controlling metal­
                                                                          lurgical structures (and hence mechanical properties)
^.4.3 .   Scope for Further Work
                                                                          of multipass welded components by precise placement
                                                                          of weldbeds . This represents a more severe control
In this area the following topics will be considered for                  requirement than either production speed or weld
inclusion in call(s) for proposals to be published in                     soundness criteria .
 1986 :
                                                                  — a specification of development approaches and hard­
— the integration into CIM of FMSs based on metal                         ware which will be used in subsequent phases of the
      removal ;                                                           project .
—     development of advanced control systems .
                                                                   The project is now focussing on two application areas,
                                                                  single and multipass welding. The development of image
                                                                  analysis and adaptive control algorithms for both welding
                                                                  techniques is underway with the construction of the hard­
         R & D area 5.5 : Subsystems and Components                ware .
A number of subsystems and components are required
to enable the technologies in areas 5.3 and 5.4, thus
facilitating the development and implementation of                    'General Purpose Sensory Controlled Systems for Parts
CIM . In particular, in order to compete successfully in                                       Production '
world markets for plant automation systems , it is essen­
tial to make maximum use of microelectronics technol­              Proj. Ref. 118: A /83
ogy .
                                                                   This project is directed to researching, developing and
                                                                  demonstrating the ability to obtain 2.5D and 3D images
5.5.1 .   Topics                                                  by means of visual, tactile and range sensing.
                                                                   Initially seven tasks were defined in the workplan :
Two topics have been identified as requiring collabora­
tion effort . These are :                                          i)       User specification study
— sensor systems for real time capture and interpreta­             ii)      System integration framework definition
      tion of sensor data such as that required by sub­
      area 5.4.3                                                   iii)     Gray scale sensor development
 ---pagebreak--- 31 . 12 . 85                            Official Journal of the European Communities                               No L 365 /63
iv)      Tactile sensor development                                         R&D area 5.6 : CIM Systems Applications
v)       Range finder development
                                                                   To maximise the coherence and strategic impact of the
vi)      Direct 3D sensor development
                                                                   CIM sub-programme, swift action is needed to
vii)     Stereoscopic sensor development                           encourage application centres in which developments
                                                                   in ongoing projects could be demonstrated and refined
                                                                   within a framework of integration .
    Integrated Electronic Subsystemsfor Plant Automation '         In addition to providing a focal point for community­
                                                                   based action in advanced manufacturing, benefits
Proj. Kef 179 : A/83                                               would include :
                                                                   — promoting awareness of ESPRIT work by demon­
 Within this project the functions performed by NC and                  strating ongoing R & D to a large European audi­
Robot control systems are analysed and divided into sub­                ence ;
systems. These are being realised as general purpose sub­          — highlighting needs , achievements and opportuni­
system integrated circuits which will be suitable for a                 ties in the area of CIM integration :
broad range of applications in NC and Robot control.
 Test circuits have been specified as suitable for VLSI            — providing an environment to facilitate fast proto­
application . These are being developed for two specific                typing ;
applications while work is also being directed to specify­         — catalysing subsequent developments including
 ing a co-processor which will support the design of control            product realisation .
systems and the implementation of VLSI circuits .
                                                                   5.6.1 .   Topics
            'Integrated Sensor-based Robot System '
                                                                   To achieve these objectives, the following projects and
                                                                   themes have been identified :
Proj. Ref 278 : A/84
                                                                   — CIM application and development centres .
 The objective of this project is to develop a sensor-based        — General topics for CIM support .
system prototype (vision and tactile), for real time appli­
cations , in cooperation with industrial robots for intelli­       The following topics are given as examples, but the list
gent handling and/or assembly. Test-bed applications               is non-exhaustive :
are bin-picking , and workpiece handling on a moving
conveyor belt .                                                    — product design guidelines for automatic produc­
                                                                        tion ;
                                                                   — create an understanding and ability to design
  ' Computer-aided thermal Image Techniquefor Real-time                 mechanical products for automatic manufacturing ;
                Inspection of Composite Material '
                                                                   — methodologies for selection and configuration of
                                                                         CIM components ;
 Proj. Ref 197: A /83
                                                                   — develop tools and methodologies for selecting CIM
                                                                         components and tailoring CIM systems to meet
 This project is directed to research into imaging and
 image processing techniques using thermal scanners for                  specific company needs ;
 the development of a real time system for on-line inspec­         — economic methodologies for evaluating investment
 tion and monitoring of composite materials and products,                in CIM systems ;
 in a mass production environment.                                 — develop tools and methodologies for a correct
                                                                         economic      evaluation   of   investment   in  CIM
 In the first phase of this work , image processing equip­               systems ;
ment has been developed to an operational state suitable
                                                                   — interaction of CIM systems with organization,
for experimental purposes . In addition a prototype ther­
                                                                         infrastructures and skill requirements ;
mal impulse generator has been produced to support
 experimental aspects of this work.                                — determination of the required charges in organ­
                                                                         ization , infrastructure and skill requirements conse­
                                                                         quent upon the introduction of CIM systems ;
                                                                   — interaction of CIM systems with management
 5.5.3 .   Scope for Further Work                                        information systems ;
                                                                   — definition of data interchange between CIM
  In this area the development of microelectronic subsys­                systemsandmanagementinformationsystems(MIS).
 tems will be considered for inclusion in call(s) for pro­
 posals to be published in 1986 . However with less                 The purpose of these activities is to develop tools and
 priority than 5.4 and 5.2 .                                        facilities to promote successful CIM applications .
 ---pagebreak--- No L 365 / 64                            Official Journal of the European Communities                                 31 . 12 . 85
5.6.2 .   Current Projects and Projects Under Negotiation                    Data Transfer Between Computer Integrated
                                                                      Manufacturing Systems and Management Information
        Predesign of FMSfor Small Batch Production of                                          Systems '
                      Electronic Cards '
                                                                    Proj. Ref 319 : B/84
Pioj. Ref. 850: B/85                                                The project addresses the linkage of CIM and MIS sys­
                                                                    tems within the context in which they must operate,
Preparatory study to explore the provision of facilities to         namely, the management, technological and operational
support the development and system integration of                   infrastructure of the enterprise . This is related to the
various elements of CIM. The application area focusses              trends in information technology, the functional require­
on PCB (printed circuit boards) production . The intention          ments of both hardware, software and operating systems,
is to provide the service primarily for small and medium            and the CIM vendor industry itself Advances in com­
sized companies                                                     puter technologies have created the opportunity for
                                                                    medium sized enterprises to apply sophisticated MIS­
                                                                     CIM techniques and hardware, software tools which
                                                                    were , up to very recently, only affordable by the largest
         'Communication Network for Manufacturing
                                                                    enterprises . This project is therefore directed to actively
                        Applications '                              test design concepts, techniques and prototype sub­
                                                                    systems in medium to small sized manufacturing environ­
Pioj. Ref 955 : A /85                                               ments .
The objective of this projec t is to define , promote and pro­
vide a multi-vendor network environment for manufactur­                'Development of Toolsfor Economic Evaluation of CIM
ing applications The work has been divided into four                            in Smaller Manufacturing Companies '
phases :
                                                                     Proj. Ref 909 : B/85
—    Definition . This will consider the levels of the OSI
     structure relevant to CIM and a network architecture
     based on a hierarchical structure of networks.                  The objective of the work is to develop software tools to
                                                                     improve the ability of consultants, Chambers of Com­
—     Demonstration of a network controlling existing                merce and individual firms to carry out cost benefit
     machine tools .                                                 analyses for investment in CIM. The tools are specifically
—     Demonstration of a multilayered network architec­              aimed at small and medium-sized manufacturing com­
      ture .                                                        panies and will be portable to a range of widely-available
                                                                    personal computers .
—     Examination of very broad band width networking
     technology.
                                                                       'Implementation ofA I into Subjects for Advanced CIM '
      'Product Design for Automated Manufacture and                  Proj. Ref 975: B/ 85
                          Assembly '
                                                                     This deals with the integration of information about
                                                                     products being manufactured in CIM with the CAM
Proj . Ref. 338 : B/84                                               system . This project is directed at improving the existing
                                                                     identification systems (Remote Programmable Trans­
 The objectives of this project are two-fold. Firstly it is          mitter/Responder and Interrogator with Artificial Intel­
necessary to determine the range of manufacturing infor­             ligence) in order to meet CIM requirements , and to
mation which must be made available to the designer so               develop of remotely programmable transponders . An ini­
that products are designed which are compatible with                 tial test bed for the technology will be motor car manu­
automated manufacturing and assembly techniques                     facture and wider applications \ ithin CIM are antici­
embodied in flexible machining and flexible assembly                 pated.
(including robotic assembly) systems . Secondly it is neces­
sary to establish the basis on which this information is
best made available to the designer using for example                5.6.3 .  Scope for Further Work
 CA D systems.
                                                                     The topic on Application Centres will be considered
 Work has been done on meeting the first objective by the            for inclusion in call(s ) for proposals to be published in
collection and c ollation of product information suitable             1986 in so far as necessary because of 1985 proposals
for automated assembly. In parallel work progresses on               not maturing to contract . The area of mechanical
developing a cohesive approach to establishing the                   engineering is already well-covered by projects under
requirements for product design for automated assembly.              negotiation .