The FRISCO Long Term Research Project ran for three years from March 1996, and aimed to develop technologies for applications involving the solution of polynomial systems which arise in an industrial context. It brought together two earlier activities: the PoSSo project (BRA/6846) which had developed algorithms in this area, and NAG Ltd's Aldor activity which was aiming to develop a strongly-typed high level language for symbolic computation which could interact efficiently and effectively with tools written in conventional scientific programming languages such as C, C++, Fortran etc. Three of the partners, the Universities of Pisa and Cantabria, and the CNRS IRMAR laboratory in Rennes, had been involved in PoSSo. The group at INRIA had also been involved in PoSSo and in addition had a history of collaboration with the coordinating partner, NAG Ltd., on Aldor.
During the project the partners undertook outreach activities to identify opportunities for process improvement with industrial mathematicians. This led to a comprehensive review of polynomial algorithms suitable for non-linear modelling and a the identification of a selection of strategic areas for targeted mathematical research.
To allow resulting software to be integrated with tools and applications used by industrial mathematicians, the Aldor compiler was significantly enhanced and the use of generic component linking and embedding technologies was investigated and demonstrated in a number of practical cases. A major investigation of the requirements of a number of industrial users was carried out and several prototype demonstrators were developed. The rest of this report describes this work in detail.
The funding provided for this project has helped ensure that European researchers stay in the forefront of theoretical research in this area, as well as stimulating the development of commercial software in a marketplace dominated by North American corporations. As a long term research project it embodied a high level of risk, but it met and in some cases exceeded all of its original goals.