̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Cranfield ̽��ֱ��

New initiative to train specialists in risk, mitigation and Big Data

sc604 — Tue, 03 Feb 2015 18:00:01 +0000

Hosted as a Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) and funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the aim of the consortium is to produce a cohort of researchers who can use large or complex datasets to understand and ease the risks posed by a range of societal and environmental changes, such as a rapidly expanding population, limited natural resources, and natural hazards.

It’s imperative that business, government and wider society understand these risks so that they can develop appropriate mitigation strategies. Many businesses already recognise the need to understand and reduce the risks to infrastructure, operations and supply chains.

Through the insurance and reinsurance industries, for example, the UK is a world-renowned international centre in risk assessment, modelling and its application. ̽��ֱ��sector values strong collaboration with the UK academic research base to enable the improvement of their risk models, maintain a competitive edge, and grow their markets. As a result, the UK insurance sector is the largest in Europe, making a major contribution to the UK economy, employing 320,000 people and contributing almost 3% to GDP.

But other industries and humanitarian and development organisations also need the tools to help them assess the risks arising from increasingly complex and interconnected hazards, for example, international disaster risk reduction.

And, as identified by the recent BIS data strategy – Seizing the Data Opportunity – the UK has some of the best universities and institutes in the world, some truly innovative small businesses, and some of the richest historic datasets of any country.

This means there’s potential to produce a new generation of risk scientists able to maximise the opportunities big data offers, filling a skills shortage in this area. ̽��ֱ��CDT is a direct response to this shortage.

Minister for Universities, Science & Cities, Greg Clark, said: “In this fast-moving, digital world, the ability to handle and analyse large volumes of complex data is vital for the UK to maintain its competitive edge. That is why the government identified Big Data as one of our 8 Great Technologies and central to our Industrial Strategy.

“This £2.5 million investment to train the next generation of Big Data experts will enable a skilled workforce to develop innovative tools to assess and mitigate risk that will help business, government and wider society cope effectively with big environmental and societal changes.”

Professor Simon Pollard of Cranfield ̽��ֱ�� will lead the consortium, called DREAM (Data, Risk and Environmental Analytical Methods). It will include researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, Newcastle ̽��ֱ�� and the ̽��ֱ�� of Birmingham, together with a wide range of partners from the private and public sectors. Dr Mike Bithell from Cambridge’s Department of Geography is one of four centre directors for the programme.

Funding for ten studentships will be awarded each year. ̽��ֱ��CDT award will provide funding for three years of new student intake – 30 studentships in total – from 2015 to 2016. Two of the studentships in the 2016 cohort will be interdisciplinary and co-funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and NERC.

Students will gain advanced technical skills, be regularly brought together as a cohort to share ideas and skills, and have the opportunity to take part in partner-based secondments.

CDTs support strategically-targeted, focused PhD studentships aimed at addressing specific research and skills gaps.

Cambridge is one of four leading UK universities awarded funding to train the next generation of researchers to become experts at assessing and mitigating risk using Big Data.

In this fast-moving, digital world, the ability to handle and analyse large volumes of complex data is vital for the UK to maintain its competitive edge

Greg Clark

kris krüg

2013 Esri International User Conference

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̽��ֱ��shape of things to come

sj387 — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 08:37:30 +0000

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, industrialisation swept the globe and changed it forever: humanity mastered the art of transforming the world’s raw materials into the ‘stuff of the world’. Today, everything around us, from the cars we drive, to the goods we own and the clothes we wear is largely the product of industrial manufacturing.

But industrialisation also had an unintended effect on the global environment – contributing to the increasing burden of carbon emissions, pollution and waste – and it’s widely accepted that a new ‘green’ industrial revolution is urgently needed.

“It’s clear that current processes cannot be sustained indefinitely,” said Professor Steve Evans. “As well as the environmental effects, the world has a finite amount of natural resources, and current processes are probably only 10% efficient at converting them into usable product.”

Evans leads the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing, which connects systems engineers and business analysts at Cambridge’s Centre for Industrial Sustainability with researchers at Cranfield ̽��ֱ��, Imperial College and Loughborough ̽��ֱ��. ̽��ֱ��Centre is funded with £5.7 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Centre researchers work with multinational businesses such as Toyota, Unilever and M&S to develop the knowledge and tools that will help manufacturers navigate their way through the complexities of designing sustainable industrial processes in the long term.

“To live well, experts think that we must be able to manufacture what we need using less than a quarter of the current bio-capacity. What this means is a reduction of 75–90% in how much carbon-based energy and resources our industrial systems currently use,” said Evans. “And to achieve this will mean a complete reshaping of how we manufacture.”

His vision extends all the way to a future in which factories could have a net positive effect on the environment: “Part of the work we are doing on configurations would suggest that by the 2050s the air and water leaving factories might be cleaner than what’s going in. A greater number will either use local materials or grow the materials they use – perhaps as nanostructures or using green chemistry. This will fundamentally change scale and location decisions for factories to the point where they will be so advantageous that people will want them at the end of their street.”

Developing ideas of how eco-factories could look in the future is one aspect of the research carried out by the Centre. However, these are long-term visions, and the researchers recognise not only the complexities of change but also that the “window of opportunity for action is rapidly closing.” One key focus of their research agenda, therefore, is to understand how industries can improve their efficiency and environmental performance now, without changing current products and processes.

“How can you find out how efficient a factory can be? You just ask common sense questions,” said Evans. “We go into the factories to collect examples of sustainable industrial activity, identify new courses of action, and then publish these as case study reports.” A database of over 1,000 effective practices in industrial sustainability has been compiled and will be generally available later this year.

For Toyota, for example, the researchers discovered that significantly better industrial performance is possible through innovative thinking and careful planning without relying on the development of a ‘step change’.

Toyota operate nine manufacturing sites in Europe ranging from engine manufacture through to vehicle assembly. “Toyota took the route of developing action plans with challenging targets to reduce environmental impact – recycling waste water, sending zero waste to landfill and so on – and focused on individual aspects of manufacturing to develop best practice. By adopting these principles, they reduced the energy needed to make cars across their European factories by 44% in five years.”

“Some factories are noticeably more efficient than others,” Evans added. “We want to know why, and whether they are squeezing every last drop from best practice. If not, how much further can they go and what can competitor factories learn from this?”

Other companies studied by the team have focused their steps on improving environmental performance on packaging reduction (Philips), shifting operations from a product-based system to one in which it provides a service (Xerox), and building a new energy-efficient production facility (Adnams brewery).

“Understanding how far you can push current systems is the most urgently needed step. But technological development is also essential to achieve the significant changes in efficiency that we need,” said Evans. To help this agenda, the Centre is also looking at the technology needed to manage factories. One software tool they have built – THERM (for THrough-life Energy and Resource Modelling) – models the way that energy, materials and water can flow around factories. “Traditionally, these processes are considered as secondary to modelling production of the product and yet they are integral to approaching sustainability at a factory level.”

̽��ֱ��THERM project, funded by the Technology Strategy Board, gathered a team of practitioners (Toyota and Airbus), academics (Cranfield ̽��ֱ�� and De Montfort ̽��ֱ��) and software developers (Integrated Environmental Solutions) to create the software tool, now available to industry. ̽��ֱ��tool integrates the modelling of manufacturing processes within their environment – the factory building – to identify system-wide opportunities to reduce resource consumption, carbon emissions and waste generated.

“ ̽��ֱ��greatest opportunity to reduce the environmental impact of an industrial system comes about when we consider the system as a whole, because the optimisation of any one part is ultimately constrained by other aspects,” explained Evans, who is a member of the Foresight lead expert group that is combining the latest scientific evidence with futures analysis to help policy makers consider the Future of Manufacturing for the Government Office for Science.

Evans and his team believe that this ‘systems thinking’ approach is crucial. “ ̽��ֱ��evidence we have seen from case studies shows that sub-system approaches can dramatically improve sustainability. But to help future generations meet the needs of humanity within the carrying capacity of the planet it will be important to develop the know-how to enable changes across the whole industrial system. Such a system is likely to look very different to today’s global industry. We believe that manufacturing will change its shape.”

Researchers are providing a vision for creatively rethinking how the manufacturing industry can perform sustainably in a changing world.

This will fundamentally change scale and location decisions for factories to the point where they will be so advantageous that people will want them at the end of their street

Steve Evans

̽��ֱ��District

Factory

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