Allegro Common Lisp Success Stories

This section of our site showcases applications built using Franz's Allegro CL development environment and tools. Learn how Allegro CL products have provided solutions to complex problems across many industries, academic sites and research institutions.

Please send any comments or questions about the applications stories to: [email protected]

Recent Stories

• Barefoot Networks
  Barefoot Notworks uses Franz Allegro CL® (Allegro Common Lisp) in the design of the Barefoot Tofino series programmable switch chips to enable Artificial Intelligence, solve complexity, drive superior performance and power efficiency within networks.
• Trappist-1 Exoplanets - The SIRPASS Story
  Astronomers are celebration a new discovery, a treasue trove of planets found. The big news is that around a very nearby, cold, small star, seven rocky Earth-sized planets, all of which could potentially have liquid water. Three of them orbit in the habitable zone around the star. The planetary system is called Trappist-1. Jet Propulsion Lab's David S. Mittman and Space Telescope Science Institute's Robert Hawkins have co-authored a white paper that describes the project environment in which the Spitzer Integratesd Resource Planning and Scheduling System (SIRPASS) was developed and used in operations.
• Fast-Square Italia srl
  Coil Cut Optimizer (CCO) is an Optimization software application for Steel Service Centers, which helps human programmers generate Optimized Cutting Patterns for Slitting and Cut-To-Length machines, minimizing Trim-Loss (Scrap) and Set-up time.
• Design Power, Inc.
  Design++ enables engineers involved with plant, building and equipment design to create intelligent object models that automatically generate complex 3D designs, materials and cost reports, and fully annotated design drawings. Design++ customers include major players in the A/E/C and manufacturing industries working on projects in automatic process equipment design, automatic building systems design, automatic electric motor configuration, and automatic pipe routing systems for process plants.
• Bentley Systems, Inc.
  Bentley's PlantWise product is a knowledge-based application for plant concept design. PlantWise produces routed pipes, flexible reports, and exportable data files to any external plant design system. The system offers speed of routing, user changeable piping logic, and high level GUIs that greatly increase productivity. This productivity advantage is facilitated by the task-specific languages that PlantWise provides. Engineers can use the keywords and expressions familiar to them to express the logic they want to use. PlantWise is built on top of Design++.
• Northwestern University
  People sketch to work through ideas and to communicate, especially when dealing with spatial matters. Software that could participate in sketching could revolutionize spatial education, and provide a new kind of instrument for cognitive science research, as well as being an important scientific advance in its own right. The goal of the CogSketch project is to do the research and development needed to create a sketch understanding system that can be used as an instrument for cognitive science research and as a platform for educational software. This system, called CogSketch, is being developed by the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), a National Science Foundation Sciences of Learning Center. The vision is that, in ten years or less, sketch-base educational software can be as widely available to students as graphing calculators are today. To achieve this vision will require tight collaboration between the AI researchers on the CogSketch development team and psychologists, learning scientists, and educators.
• Planisware
  Planisware 5 is a powerful and highly configurable PPM solution, great for organizations that need to manage projects across departments. Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is the centralized management of processes, methods, and technologies used by project managers and project management offices (PMOs) to analyze and collectively manage current or proposed projects based on numerous key characteristics. The objectives of PPM are to determine the optimal resource mix for delivery and to schedule activities to best achieve an organization's operational and financial goals -- while honouring constraints imposed by customers, strategic objectives, or external real-world factors.
• Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2)
  Project Aristo is a flagship project of AI2, a first step towards a machine that contains large amounts of knowledge in machine-computable form that can answer questions, explain those answers, and discuss those answers with users. Central to the project is machine reading semi-automated acquisition of knowledge from natural language texts. We are also integrating semi-formal methods for reasoning with knowledge, such as textual entailment and evidential reasoning, and a robust hybrid architecture that has multiple reasoning modules operating in tandem. Project Aristo represents a new start towards intelligent systems, building on experience from the prior Project Halo.
• BeamWise
  BeamWise is a set of software tools and related services for the design of biophotonic and other complex optical systems. BeamWise is implemented using Design++, a knowledge-based engineering platform that significantly simplifies the capture of in-house engineering expertise and streamlines integration of legacy systems into design automation and product configuration solutions.
• Izware
  Izware maintains the Mirai application originally created by Nichimen Graphics. Mirai is still used extensively throughout the Animation Community, and was used in the Lord of the Rings Film Trilogy. Former Nichimen Graphics employee, Bai Raitt, used Mirai to design and build the system animators used to create the faces of some of the Trilogy's more unique characters -- Gollum, Balrog, Cave Troll and Treebeard.
• KETL
  The Knowledge Engineering Toolkit & Language (KETL) is a representation language and inference engine being developed to support a broad range of knowledge-management tasks. The logic-based representation language provides expressive power similar to CycLtarget blank image., with 2nd-order syntax and 1st-order semantics. Assertions are fully represented objects. Contexts are supported for assertions (similar to Microtheories in CycL). The inference engine is relatively primitive but provides basic inference capabilities and is being extended. It currently supports transitive binary predicates (e.g., subClass), extension predicates (e.g., isa), inheritance, with emerging support for rules and prototypes, truth maintenance, and explanations.
• MTU Aero Engines
  MTU Aero Engines is Germany's leading engine manufacturer and an established global player in the industry. They have started a European research project called EXAMPLE. The main objective of the EXAMPLE project is to improve the design and analysis processes for the air passage of aircraft engines by enhancing the existing mathematical technology using the new approach of Isogeometric Analysis (IGA). One of the goals of EXAMPLE is to use new geometry representations developed in Allegro CL for generating turbine part geometries.
• Siscog
  Siscog's CREWS provides solutions to the core problem transportation companies face today - effective planning and management of the work of crew members. CREWS addresses all phases of the planning and management process - long-term planning (duty and roster planning), short-term planning (staff allocation and changes to the plan), real-time management, and controlling the work done. CREWS enables quick and efficient planning and management staff, provides fast responses to train and crew changes, minimises crew-related train disruptions, and provides evaluation of strategic options. A presentation on Siscog's Lisp applications was given at the ELS'13 conference, the presentation slides are available here.
• Principles of Biomedical Informatics, Second Edition
  Lisp is the main programing language in this edition, as in the first. It is by far the best for achieving the goals of the book, to present biomedical informatics as a systematic set of formal ideas and methods that are naturally expressed as computations on well-defined representations. In Chapter 1, the basic ideas of symbolic computing are introduced gradually as needed. The Appendix has been expanded to include more tutorial material as well as references to aid the reader who is not so familiar with Lisp. All the code that appears in this book is available at the author's web site at the University of Washington, http://faculty.washington.edu/ikalet/
• Pandorabots Inc.
  Pandorabots Inc. is a company supporting the development and deployment of artificially intelligent chatbots. Pandorabots' chatbots engage clients in deeply interesting and user-driven experiences with the use of natural language and emotions. The newest chatbots are based on strong learning and reasoning technologies. Chatbots can be used in almost any application currently based on human interactions.

• PEPITe S.A.
  DATAmaestro is a powerful cloud predictive analytics tool that will transform your enterprise data from complex problems to working solutions. One multi-dimensional tool to extract, analyze, select, filter, model and report. PEPITe's innovative DATAmaestro combines proven analytic tools with a powerful data management kernel. The business backbone of the product comprises leading data mining technologies, performance management, tailored key performance indicators, and automatic drill-down to solve problems based on facts.

• GenEth
  GenEth enables the analysis of ethical dilemmas of a particular type, or types, and the discovery of a decision principle to resolve them that is consistent with information gleaned from them.
• CafeOBJ
  Developed by Professor Kokicih Futatsugi and his team from Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology's (JAIST) Language Design Laboratory, CafeOBJ is an advanced formal specification language for writing formal (i.e. mathematical) specifications of models for a wide variety of software and systems, and verifying their properties.
• LEORDO Computation Platform
  Leordo is the Distribution Version of the full Leonardo system developed at Linköping University. The Leonardo computation system is intended as a platform for applications that make use of a knowledgebase. Possible applications include:
  • Personal assistant systems that help their users to keep track of a miscellany of things of various kinds and to operate on this information
  • Knowledge-based autonomous agents
  • Semantic web systems
  • Tutorial systems for use in university courses in these areas

• Alstom Smartlock Interlocking
  With more than 1,500 installations in over 25 countries, the safety and reliability of the new generation of Alstom's Smartlock electronic interlocking products has more than proven itself. Interfacing with the Automated Train Control (Atlas) system and conventional track equipment (Smartway), Smartlock interlocking guarantees safety for traffic on all types of networks.
• Design Parametrics and Bentley partner to deliver Design++ and PlantWise applications for comprehensive software solutions for infrastructure lifecycle.
• ACL2 (A Computational Logic for Applicative Common Lisp) ACL2 is an interactive system in which you can model digital artifacts and guide the system to mathematical proofs about the behavior of those models. It has been used at such places as AMD, Centaur, IBM, and Rockwell Collins to verify interesting properties of commercial designs. It has been used to verify properties of models of microprocessors, microcode, the Sun Java Virtual Machine, operating system kernels, other verifiers, and interesting algorithms. ACL2 is both a programming language in which you can model computer systems and a tool to help you prove properties of those models. ACL2 is part of the Boyer-Moore family of provers, for which its authors have received the 2005 ACM Software System Award.
• OMAS - Open Multi-Agent System OMAS is a multi-agent platform derived from a number of previous research projects and teaching courses. OMAS design goals tried to answer the problems of architecture, skill definition, protocol implementation, ontologies, dialog using natural language, and debugging, so as to simplify the work of an application designer. OMAS uses a "plug in" type approach offering a model of generic cognitive agent. Agents are of three types: service, personal assistants and transfer. They are organized as coteries, meaning that each agent sees all messages. Agents have separate ontologies and tasks models. Agents are multi-threaded and can execute several tasks concurrently. Personal assistants have prototype dialogs and vocal interface.
• Synthetic Teammate The Synthetic Teammate project (Ball et aI., 2010) is an early applied research project aimed at research and development of language and task enabled constructive entities that can function as synthetic teammates in Air Force relevant team training simulations. The research is primarily supported by the Air Force Research Laboratory, 711th Human Performance Wing, Human Effectiveness Directorate, Warfighter Readiness Research Division. Cognitive Engineering Research on Team Tasks (CERTT) is the Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) simulation in which the Synthetic Teammate is being integrated. The Synthetic Teammate functions as the pilot, interacting with a human navigator and photographer to perform a series of 40-minute reconnaissance missions.
• Ubiquitous DeviceSQL Ubiquitous Corp.'s DeviceSQL appeared in 2002 as a totally new category of data management software specialized for embedded systems and based on stream-based data management technologies. It has been used in cellular phones, onboard equipment, IP set-top boxes, communication equipment, digital cameras, etc. DeviceSQL covers all products, ranging from low-end ones to high-end ones, which cannot be covered by other embedded RDBMSs, and conforms to the Oracle PL/SQL industry-standard programming language. DeviceSQL is capable not only of making inquiries into data using an SQL statement but also of combining an SQL statement with a PL (Procedure Language) procedural language, such as an IF, FOR or LOOP statement, and thereby performing more complicated processing with a simple command.
• RavenPack has successfully built a sophisticated system that pushes the state of the art in computer processing of unstructured news content. A leading provider of real-time news analysis services, financial professionals rely on RavenPack for its speed and accuracy in analyzing large amounts of news content on more than 28,000 publicly traded companies across 80 countries. Financial institutions use RavenPack's news analysis services to generate better returns by systematically incorporating the effects of news in their investment process.
• Pathway Tools by SRI. Updated. SRI International offers innovative tools for modeling and analyzing genomes, metabolic pathways, and regulatory networks to support activities in drug discovery, agriculture, and biotechnology. These tools accelerate research and lead to a greater understanding of biological systems. SRI's unique Omics Viewers support visualization and analysis of large omics datasets on genome-scale cellular network diagrams. BioCyc and Pathway Tools are freely available for academic research.
• Aura. As part of Project Halo, Vulcan Inc.'s staged, long-range research effort towards the development of a "Digital Aristotle", SRI has developed AURA to allow subject matter experts (SMEs), for example, biologists, physicists, and chemists, and scientific educators to formulate knowledge and questions to query that knowledge, with an ever-decreasing reliance on knowledge engineers. As part of this effort, SRI have developed "Inquire: A Textbook with Knowledge Representation and Reasoning".
• LOGOS. KnowledgeTools' LOGOS creates transparency, helps to control risks, reduces legal fees and ensures quality. On the server side, the system is based on Allegro Common Lisp communicating with a MySQL database. The communication between client and server is done via HTTP. You can use LOGOS as an online service with secure transmission channels or install the server software locally on your network. In all cases, all of the users will be granted easy and remote access to the application and data. It enables individual persons or arbitrarily large teams to access a central knowledge base and to save expensive material procurement.
• NewSuperAgent is specialized to handle tasks related to EDSf axsRes airline reservation processes. However, the concept of screen-scraping and generating messages allows its use wherever repetitive tasks occur, particularly in a hosted mainframe environment. In every facet of our lives we are faced with tasks that repeat themselves day in, day out. NewSuperAgent screen-scrapes your applications for standard situations and generates the appropriate entries to solve the issue according to pre-defined rules, just like any human being would do.
• Lispix is a public domain image analysis program for Microsoft Windows, written and maintained by David Bright. While including basic image processing functions found in NIH Image, ImageJ, and in some commercial programs, it features a collection of special purpose research tools for electron microscopy and spectral imaging at NIST. In spite of that, many of the tools incorporated into Lispix have been useful for other researchers.
• GBBopen is a modern, high-performance, open source blackboard-system framework based on the concepts that were explored and refined in the UMass Generic Blackboard system and the commercial GBB product. It is not, however, a clone or updated version of either system. Instead, the knowledge and experience gained with these frameworks has been applied in GBBopen to create a new generation of blackboard-system capabilities and make them freely available to a wide audience. GBBopen enables complex blackboard-system applications to be developed quickly and executed efficiently.
• Dulcinea, from A. L. Productions Inc. The Fusion of Art and Science: Combining Generative-art Technologies with Robotics - Dulcinea is a fully-automated robot that creates paintings using a brush, paints and canvas. She operates continuously, changing paint colors and washing her brush between colors as needed, until a painting is completed.
• EthEl - A Principled Ethical Eldercare Robot. Researchers Michael Anderson from the University of Hartford and Susan Leigh Anderson from the University of Connecticut have developed an approach to computing ethics that entails the discovery of ethical principles through machine learning and the incorporation of these principles into a system’s decision procedure. They've programmed their system into the robot NAO, manufactured by Aldebaran Robotics. It is the first robot to have been programmed with an ethical principle.
• Martin Mallinson has open sourced ICanCad Schemata, a Schematic Entry System. Use it to draw and simulate electrical schematics. Schemata is not a prototype or PCB board design tool – it is a capable Analog IC design tool that can be used with most FAB semiconductor processes. The current version performs Spice simulation using Simucad’s SmartSPICE program to which it connects using low level Window’s functions (you need never see the SmartSPICE window) just point and click. Schemata is intimately connected to other MS Windows – all common cut, paste operations etc are supported.

• 2Is Inc.'s Oasis is an integrated logistics decision support and verification toolset/framework. Rapid exploration of part data is an essential benefit of Oasis. The information needed to make a decision assessment is one-click away due to an integrated logistics database and architecture: Oasis provides a Population explorer, NSN explorer, a Report Card, and an Expert system for finding and analyzing inventory management condition exceptions. The expert system is grounded in the specific rules and terminology of the DoD supply chain.
• Shapiro Group's StructureLab is a computational system which has been developed to permit the use of a broad array of approaches to the analysis of the structure of RNA. The goal of the development is to provide a large set of tools that can be well integrated with experimental biology to aid in the process of the determination of the underlying structure of RNA sequences.
• Boeing Simplified English Checker (BSEC) helps technical writers check their documents for compliance with ASD (AeroSpace and Defence Industries Association of Europe) Simplified Technical English, a writing standard for aerospace maintenance documentation.
• BioBike (formerly named BioLingua) is a revolutionary concept in client-server programmability for computational biology and bioinformatics.
• Harvard's Children's Hospital Informatics Program uses Lisp and Allegro CL to power SNPer, a web-based application that provides scientists with a variety of tools that greatly speed up the analysis process of SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms).
• Genworks International
• MDL Information Systems
• AARON

The rest of our stories have been classified by application type, and can be found on the menu bar to the left.