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Firemaster Modula Plus automatic fire extinguishing units are claimed to be a technological breakthrough which provides automatic fire protection for paint processing and paint spirit and resin stores as well as other fire risks. These automatic fire extinguishers are charged with halon gas, which leaves no residue, is not corrosive and causes no water damage.

If you use a personal computer, you probably use more than one program and you probably use some programs more often than others. If your personal computer is an IBM PC or compatible, you have probably become confused when starting to use a new program or one you have not used recently. The author completes a baker's dozen of “Common Sense Personal Computing” articles with a somewhat lighthearted look at a fairly serious problem — how programs frustrate occasional users, make life interesting for power users and trap unwary users of all sorts. He discusses odd and inconsistent uses of keystrokes, overuse of function and special keys, and problems in identifying functions and keystrokes.

There are many methods by which the state of dispersion of pigments may be studied, either in the liquid paint or in the dried film. They range from essentially practical methods useful for production control to sophisticated laboratory techniques capable of providing quantitative data on the number, size, and type of particles present in a dispersion.

Professional workstations are dedicated computers that possess sufficient hardware power and software capabilities to allow the routine performance of job‐related activities by professional users. The advent of these computers reflects current trends in decentralization and specialization of computer equipment. The paper presents an informal review of classes of workstations of potential interest to engineers and scientists. The review was motivated by projected computing needs in a software‐intensive research‐and‐development industrial laboratory.

Modules and modularity have been popular concepts in operations research and management rhetoric for decades. Nevertheless, it seems that there is no single universal definition of modularity for classical research themes such as modularity in physical products or modular manufacturing. The purpose of this paper is to describe the current state of modularity research and to clarify the concept and impacts of modularity by means of a literature review. The paper discusses whether the modularity concept originally developed in the context of physical products could be applied in the context of product‐related services.

In this paper, the authors use a methodology called systematic integrative literature review to describe the current state of modularity research and to define – based on the findings of the review – the themes that are most commonly related to the modularity concept. As service modularity research is a relatively new topic, the authors look for definitions and themes related to modularity from other areas of modularity research.

The paper presents four key themes and definitions associated with modularity in different perspectives. To illustrate how modularity can be comprehended in the service context, the paper presents examples related to logistics services.

The use of an integrative literature review has its limitations and a more thorough review of service literature is needed for more in‐depth understanding of how modularity is actually manifested and conceptualized in the service context. In the future, in‐depth interviews of service providers will be needed for a more thorough understanding of whether the modularity approach can be used in services today and in the future and if so, how it can be applied in practice.

The findings may be useful particularly for manufacturers and logistics service providers in improving their service offerings and processes.

There is growing interest in issues related to modularity. The paper discusses the key themes related to modularity in the contexts of product, production and processes, organization and supply chain, and service. In addition, the paper illustrates some practical implications for modularity, particularly in the logistics services context.

An announcement by Marconi Communications Systems Ltd. (U.K.) about a contract it has concluded with British Telecom for a Fibre‐Optic Video System provides an interesting comment on the “state of the art” of this new concept of communications.

Expert systems are being effectively applied to a variety of engineering problems. A growing number of languages and development tools are available for their building. Expert systems building tools (shells) are not so flexible as the high‐level languages, but they are easier to use. The problem is that there are too many development tools on the market today, no standards for their evaluation are available, so it is quite difficult to choose the ‘best’ tool for the developer's/user's needs. This paper is an attempt to review the situation on the confused market. Eighty‐six development tools are described in a table form for easy comparisons. Tools implemented on the AI machines only are not included in this survey.

Recently, many control architectures for robots have been proposed. However, in these architectures, it is difficult to add new functions to existing applications or add new applications. Moreover, developing a robot control system using many researchers makes it difficult to cooperate with each other. In order to deal with these problems, we propose a Humanoid Robot Control Architecture (HRCA) based on Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). The proposed HRCA is organized as a client/server control architecture. The HRCA is implemented as an integration of many humanoid robot control modules, which correspond to CORBA servers and clients. By applying these to “Bonten‐Maru I” a humanoid robot, which is under development in our laboratory, we describe the HRCA modules and the effectiveness of HRCA. We confirmed the effectiveness of HRCA from simulation and experimental results. By using the proposed HRCA, the control of the humanoid robot in a distributed environment such as a Local Area Network (LAN) is possible and thus various humanoid robots in the world can share their own modules with each other via the Internet.