In the mid 1990s I was woking at Realtime Software to automate an aluminium smelter. One of the problems was that there many aspects of the system that needed to communicate with other:
Control of the smelting reduction cells (called pots) that produce the metal is done by raising and lowering the anode into a the smelting pot which is a cathode.
There are temperature sensors to measure the temperature in the pot.
There are ammeters to measure the current through the pot.
Operator screens show the current states of each pot line (there are 186 pots per line and 3 lines in just one of the smelters).
A database records each activity - movement of an anode, topping up of the and emptying of a pot etc.
Ian Jamieson, MD of Realtime, produced an idea that would make this easy to control. It was a publish and subscribe system that we called Message Director. Applications controlling each aspect of the system communicated through messages that were handled by a central 'director' application. An application that controlled movement of the anode, for instance, received messages that directed it to move. These messages could come from an application that controlled anode movement by monitoring current and temperature through the pot but could also come from an operator console where an operator could override the system movement. A database application also received these messages and logged the movements to a database.
The project was finished (under time and under budget with only 3 people!). Unfortunately, after the project was finished Ian died in a car accident whist driving to the smelter.
I realised that this concept was world beating. There was one deficiency, however. In Message Director, the receiver of a message had to know the data format of a message it received. For instance a message that directed the movement of an an anode had a particular message ID, in this case a structure with a pot number, a movement adopt (+ or -) and some other data. Similarly, each message had a format that that any receiver of the message needed to know.
I moved to Queensland to work on a smelter there and around 2000 got funding from the Queensland Government to develop UMM. (Actually, in the same office as where WiFi was developed.) We had students from The University of Queensland working on the project and also developed a layer to work on Bluetooth in its early days. However, I couldn't get a suitable company interested enough to fund the project to a point where it was marketable. I needed a team of very intelligent programmers who could understand the concept of what I was doing.
This year it all changed. Using Claude I found I have my team of programmers. Claude recommended using Python to build it initially but the design is such that agents written in any language can be plugged in. Claude has written most of the code and a large part of the documentation. Claude immediately grasped the concepts and alerted me to potentials in the design that I hadn't envisaged - such as the potential in a teaching environment.
The result here is from a lot of interaction with Claude but the concept has been taken to point more advanced than would have been possible with just a few programmers.
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