Computer- aided plant

layout seminar Helsinki

Computer- aided

design conference

Southampton

62

CONFERENCES AND SYMPOSIA

The Computer-aided Plans Layout semi-

nar, organised jointly by the Post-Graduate

Education Centre of the Engineering Socie-

tics in Finland and the Department of

Mechanical Engineering of the Technical

University of Helsinki, held at Dipoli.

Otaniemi, Helsinki, during March 1969 was

attended by 35 delegates from Scandinavia

and Germany. The two day seminar was

held to introduce Computer-aided Plant

Layout to engineers in Scandinavia and in

this respect was very successful.

The programme for the two days was very

full and started with a paper given by

Mr. R. Muthers of Richard Muthers &

Associates on ‘Fundamentals of Systematic

Layout Planning’. This described the work

done by Mr. Muthers on Plant Layout and

covered the organisation of data for layout

planning, the Relationship Chart and its

purpose and application, the space relation-

ship and also evaluated alternative proposals.

Mr. Muthers continued with Systematic

Layout Planning applied to a specific

problem taken from his consulting esperi-

ence. Dr. J. M. Moore, a visiting Fulbright

Lecturer described his work in developing

a Computerised Relationship Layout Plan-

ning Program (CORELAP). This program

was used later in the seminar as a tutorial

program to solve Mr. Muthers’ layout

problem.

Mr. B. Whitehead (Senior Lecturer,

University of Liverpool) present4 two

The Conference on Computer-Aided De-

sign organised by the Institution of Electrical

Engineers and held at Southampton Uni-

versity during April this year attracted a truly

international list of participants.

The papers given, around 80 in number.

were arranged into three parallel sessions and

were supposedly grouped by subject. How-

ever this grouping was a bit haphazard and

several papers on the same subject were

grouped so as to conflict. A good example

of this was a paper ‘On-line computer-aided

control system design using a graphical

display’ presented by B. A. Dixon and J. E.

Ironside (University of Manchester) which

was classified under ‘On-line Systems’ and a

Paper given by P. Atkinson and R. L. Davey

(Reading University) titled ‘Computer-aided

design of closed-loop control systems’. Both

these papers covered the same subject and

both used interactive graphics terminals.

papers based on his work developing a

circulation analysis program to arrange

facilities. He discussed how the program

logic was arranged and how it works and

how it could be applied IO a school layout

problem and a hospital layout problem.

Dr. Moore also described the basic ideas

contained in an improvement type layout

program CRAFT (Computerised Relative

Allocation of Facilities Technique).

Mr. M. Krejcirik (Research Institute for

Building and Architecture, Prague) described

a construction type program (Rugr Al-

gorithm) which includcsacapability toorient-

ate departments in a particular direction as

well as restricting certain departments to the

perimeter of the layout. (This paper will be

published in the next issue of Cornprr/er.

.+tidd &vi&w. 1

The problem solving session held at the

end of the first day enabled the delegates to

actually use both CORELAP and Mr.

Whitehead’s Circulation Analysis program

on a computer, the data being processed

overnight and returned first thing the next

morning as tinished layouts. Participants

were also given the opportunity to purchase

IBM card decks of the CORELAP program

and punched paper tapes of a modified

version of Mr. Whitehead’s program.

This seminar served as an introduction to

c-a.d. techniques to Scandinavian engineers

and it is to be hoped that it will l-e followed

by others in the not too distant future.

There seemed IO be little new \vork

described in the computer-aided circuit

design field and this was probably because

the electronics side of c-a.d. had their own

conference devoted solely to c-a.c.d. tech-

niques only II months before at Sheffield

University. However on the mechanical side

several interesting subjects were presented.

S. Singh (N.E.L.) described w.ork on com-

puter-aided bearing design. His paper

presented a conversational mode program

written to design a hydrodynamic pressure-

fed journal bearing for steady loading. With

this program the designer is able to interro-

gate more data, and modify the design so as

to obtain an optimum performance bearing.

A paper describing a program to optimise

the vertical profile of a road was presented

by G. Mitra (Scientific Control Systems

Ltd.) and V. Calogero (Institute of Computer

Science). This program takes into account

COMPUTER AIDED DESIGN