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Collaborations funded through EPSRC Interact and RCUK UK-China Science Bridge resulted in QUB's advanced control research having important economic and environmental impact in China, Pakistan, Vietnam. This includes the creation of new core modules for the Shanghai Automation Instrumentation Co (SAIC) SUPMAX Distributed Control System series of products now in use for whole plant monitoring and control to maximise energy efficiency and reduce pollutant emissions. These products have since 2008 increased SAIC's revenue by over $50M p.a. Related networked monitoring technologies have been successfully deployed in Baosteel's hot-rolling production lines and in the Nantong Water Treatment Company that treats 20,000 tonnes of industrial waste water daily.
As a key participant in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Dr Perkins has been instrumental in developing key protocol standards that underpin modern telecommunications. The Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) acts as a transport layer distributing audio-visual data across the network, whilst the Session Description Protocol (SDP) describes the format and destination of streaming media. These standards are essential components of 3G and 4G mobile phone standards and form the infrastructure for many fixed telephone networks. They are implemented in Apple's Mac OS X and iOS, Google's Android, and Microsoft Windows, and feature in billions of devices around the world.
Pioneering research at UCL Department of Computer Science (CS) into multimedia communications over the Internet led directly to the development of central techniques used in voice-over-IP (VoIP), videoconferencing, and instant messaging. Millions of people worldwide today use applications that incorporate these techniques. In particular, UCL CS created the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and the Session Description Protocol (SDP), two Internet standards that comprise the primary way multimedia calls are established on the Internet. They are at the core of products made by Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Siemens, and Polycom, among many others, and are used in most 3G mobile telephone networks. Implementing the technology reduces costs for businesses, with Oracle, for example, realising $18 million in savings since 2010.
Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a controller design methodology involving on-line dynamic optimisation of a user-defined objective. The research of Prof. D.Q. Mayne FRS and his colleagues at Imperial College has resulted in the first MPC algorithms capable of dealing with both linear and nonlinear systems and hard constraints on controls and states, thus making MPC a viable technique for industrial applications. His research in linear and nonlinear MPC has been exploited by multinational companies such as Honeywell and ABB. Evidence of impact is found in: 1) ethylene production by Basell Polyolefins GmbH resulting in economic benefits in millions of dollars annually; 2) Sinopec's JinShan power plant efficiency, reducing fuel consumptions of 500 tons of coal and 1,700 tons of coke per annum; 3) automotive powertrain design creating new business for Honeywell (based on OnRAMP design suite); 4) ABB's cpmPlus Expert Optimizer tools used for cement manufacturing, affecting companies such as Untervaz (Switzerland), Lägerdorf (Germany) and Buzzi (Italy); 5) ABB's BoilerMaz system for optimising boiler start-up mechanism resulting in energy savings per start-up of around 15%.
Researchers at Queen Mary have applied mathematical modelling techniques to understand how and when problems may arise in complex man-made infrastructure networks including electricity, gas, global shipping and haulage networks. Many of these networks have points of vulnerability where a local issue such as an earthquake, a terrorist attack or even a simple engineering problem can bring down widespread areas of the network. Our research and the associated modelling techniques have impacted on organisations including the UK Treasury Office and the European Commission's Joint Research Centres at both Petten and Ispra, where it has been used to inform UK and European policy guidelines and legislation for infrastructure projects.
Research by Higham, Estrada and Grindrod into new, computable measures for large, dynamically evolving communication networks has allowed the automatic identification of individuals who act as influencers, or efficient listeners. This research insight has been taken up by Bloom Agency (Leeds), a digital marketing and media agency. Bloom has used these ideas to strengthen their Data Insights Team, leading to investment in new jobs, generation of new business and delivery of better results for their clients. Bloom's commercially available real time social planning software product, Whisper, builds directly on the published research, and is at the heart of the agency's success in doubling staff numbers to 60 in recent months, having grown its annual income by 50% to £2.4Million through the use of these new tools.
Low-cost wireless solutions beyond the technologies available previously and developed at Loughborough University since 2005 are used by IDC, and Sure, who integrate these technologies in several products and services so generating impacts in terms of:
The technologies have been deployed in a logistics distribution centre (ToysRUs), an automotive manufacturing process (Toyota), and a safety and security system (Sure).
The application of advanced control algorithms has generated an impact on the economy and the environment through increased precision and reduced cost of operation of fast mechanical systems. A reduction in fuel consumption and CO2 emissions has been achieved in the transportation industry by the implementation of novel advanced control algorithms for advanced cruise control systems.
Lancaster University's pioneering research on Quality-of-Service (QoS) architecture has led to significant impact on the development of TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio) — the digital radio standard used by emergency and public safety services globally. The route to impact was via UK projects on Mobile and Emergency Multimedia. It involved the transfer of QoS technology and know-how to HW Communications Ltd (HWC), a Lancaster-based SME. HWC became instrumental in developing the outcomes of our collaboration in TETRA's Multimedia Exchange Layer (MEX) standard and its specification for TETRA II (or TETRA Enhanced Data Services, TEDS) — a new version of TETRA that enables multimedia data services. MEX was adopted as a new clause in the TETRA II release in 2010. The impact is that vendors of TETRA equipment manufactured after 2010 can implement MEX in their products, thereby leveraging Lancaster's pioneering QoS research to enable applications to obtain the best possible level of service in a standardised way — which is absolutely crucial for the public-safety and related applications for which TETRA is being used.
Mobile technologies and in particular mobile applications have become key drivers of the economy in many countries especially those that lack established communications infrastructures. Since 2003, the research team led by Professor Al-Begain has created both significant infrastructure and know-how that became the base for the creation of the £6.4million Centre of Excellence in Mobile Applications and Services (CEMAS) that is providing research and development to SMEs in Wales to increase their competitiveness. In the first three years since its inception 28 projects have been completed and 66 companies have received services.