Phil Brubaker

If you were a manager or CEO and had the choice of a simulation design versus an optimization design, which would you pick? Train Educators: Modeling & Simulation’s next step is (Mathematical) Optimizations. Optimizations require an Objective (function). Today's Engineers & Scientists solve problems with a “Find X” mind-set. With some Operational Research training they could expand their thinking to a “Find X to Optimize Y” mind-set. Then they would be ready for Optimizations, Calculus-level programming and software. (This would drop today’s design times that require months even man years to one or two days! Manufacturing processes could be optimized to the days demand and thus maximize their profits.) “Find X to Optimize Y” thinking among professors will cause most Engineering & Science textbooks to be rewritten with optimization examples and discussions. This will be great stuff for industries and government; applied engineering and/or science not just theories.

Many people thought that the Wright Brother's idea of an 'airplane' would never fly. But, what if it did? What if Oil sales income doubled or more? Would crude oil prices increase? (Everyone is going to want more for their piece of the pie, right?) How would this effect your company? John D Rockefeller was quoted saying, "If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success." Any future John D Rockefeller's reading this proposal? Are you interested in increasing your company profits by several orders of magnitude? Does your company have a company goal or objective that all employees know about and follow? If so, continue reading on this proposal by reading my article "Company Goal: Increase Productivity?" (a dozen pages). Go to web page http://goal-driven.net/textbooks/index.html and click on the 'download' link, its free!

In the ‘old’ days, when a circuit seemed to have a problem, one could look at each circuit to see if they could detect a bad circuit. Today, finding a bad chip is hard to due. Seeing a chip’s circuit may not be possible, how then can one determine a bad chip? For example, in the 1970s, Memorex Corp. was designing their first “Thin Film Head” (TFH) and using micro chip components. It was soon realized that something was wrong with a small percent of its disc drives being made with these chips. But, how to detect or find the bad drives was not known. Destructive testing seemed like the only choice. Years went bye. No solution! One team was working on a math model for an isolated readback pulse. A model seemed good, so the team took 200 TFHs and ran them all thru the process to see how the model handled them all and their variances. 199 TFHs showed well with the model. But, the 200th looked strange but the model said it was fine! Model fit the data well. Telling ...