Software and Technology Projects developed by Dr. Macfarlane include:

  • Cofounder of JustMyNeighbors.com - a community message system that uses geospatial relationships to connect neighbors. The intent of the site is to promote community communications. It distinguishes itself from standard list servers by maintaining a neighborhood concept and keeping personal information - such as email addresses - private.

  • Development of Capacity Planning Software that incorporates uncertainty in yields and material costs in order to develop a full understanding of the financial risk associated with the initial startup of manufacturing operations. An example is presented for lithium-ion battery manufacturing. Click to download a copy of the paper Risk Analysis in Manufacturing Startup

  • Development of information technology security risk management software that incorporates uncertainty in order to provide an analysis of the likely bounds on the overall risk exposure for the organization.

  • Development of a rule parser to sort, evaluate and analyze geospatial relationships. This provided a top-down view of the rule set that had previously been managed by excel spreadsheets.

  • Development of a knowledge based system that designs custom exercise prescriptions based on testing data.

  • Lead architect in the development of the OnStar telematics applications. Patents submitted in the areas of signal processing, a smart key with cellular connectivity, and social calendar communications via telematics/email integration.

  • Development of a quantitative analysis of replenishment activities for a major retailer using dynamic simulation.

  • Co-investigator of a project to model combustion by incorporating detailed chemistry into models of turbulent reacting flows. The purpose of the project was to examine the interaction of chemistry and turbulence in order to reduce pollution production and increase the efficiency of the combustion process. This involved abstracted modeling schemes for chemical kinetics, automatic code generation, qualitative reasoning about chemical dynamics, automated model reduction, implementations on parallel machines, and data visualization. A high performance computing framework solution called POET: Parallel Object-Oriented Environment and Toolkit was a result of this effort. This software was patented and successfully reused in other projects and domains including Genome Sequencing.

  • Principal Investigator for Frameworks for Next-Generation Machining and Manufacturing Project. This project was to create a future manufacturing information architecture that integrates and augments the knowledge and data associated with a product description as the product travels through the design-to-manufacture cycle.

  • Developed high-level representations for a chemical experimentation laboratory information system for supporting enzyme kinetics analysis. The system incorporated three aspects of the experimentation process: model development, experiment design and implementation, and system identification. Experiments to verify the resulting model were performed by robotic laboratory equipment.