Re: [Fis] 2004 FIS session: concluding comments

Dear colleagues,

I have been very busy during last months with courses, projects and things
like that ---far less interesting than the present discussion. Unluckily,
I was unable to participate in this exciting session. But fortunately, as
Michel remarked, we can retrieve the postings and the discussion from the
FIS site.

  I would like just to make a very brief comment about entropy and
information in my own field. As many of you already know from the past fis
session on sustainable development, my specialization is on thermoeconomic
analysis. It is an energy analysis, based on the Second Law of
thermodynamics (entropy), suitable to be applied to complex factories and
industrial systems. It studies how the resources consumed in an industrial
plant are distributed among the different pieces of equipment and how much
they participate in the final product(s) formation. In other words, it
allows to evaluate and analyze the process of cost formation (amount of
energy consumed for producing a product) throughout the analysis of the
interactions of the different plant units and throughout the entropy
generated in each physical equipment.

I agree with Pedro, in some private discussions that we have had in the
past, that this is a typical informational problem in which there is a neat
connection between entropy generation and creation of economic information.
In the thermoeconomic analysis, we study how the energy quality (exergy),
which is in very close connection with entropy generation, is degraded in
its flow along the productive process and as a consequence an economic
input (information) is created. I think that the methodology of this
thermoeconomic analysis is very systematic and formal, and might be
generalized and applied to other fields, to tentatively analyze, with
appropriate measurable magnitudes, the generation and distribution of some
"information" throughout the structure & processes of a system consisting
of different "components" or "pieces of equipment" in mutual interaction.

During the vacational period I will retrieve all your comments in this very
exciting session that I have missed!

Best regards to everybody

Luis

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Received on Wed Jun 16 11:26:08 2004