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A quiet technology revolution in the UK has been changing the way that police officers on the beat and hospital nurses access and record information, using handheld electronic notebooks that bring large time and cost savings. This revolution began as a University of Glasgow research programme and led to the creation of a successful spin-out company, Kelvin Connect. Acquired in 2011 by the UK's largest provider of communications for emergency services, Kelvin Connect has grown to 30 staff. Its Pronto systems are now in use by 10% of UK police forces and nursing staff in several UK hospitals.
Many operations in daily life, from manufacturing to running a hospital, need to optimise the return on use of resources where volume and value are conditions. Scheduling theory tackles some of the hardest practical optimisation problems, not known to be solvable in reasonable computation time. Strusevich and Kellerer have been able to reformulate practical scheduling challenges as `knapsack problems' - dealing with volume and value constraints - and then design approximation algorithms which can be applied back to the original challenge. The work has attracted EPSRC funding, stimulated a new field of research which is developing fast, been widely published, led to presentations at international conferences including the 2009 Computers and Industrial Engineering conference attended by industry practitioners and is impacting on Combinatorial Optimisation research.
A QUB spin-out company, EventMAP, led by Queen's University Belfast researchers, has commercialised joint research in resource planning and optimisation by QUB and University of Nottingham to build a global capability in resource planning and management. The specific impact of the QUB team's activities in research and commercialisation include:
(i) Saving real estate construction costs through simulation and optimisation at the planning stage. In one recently completed commercial project for Victoria University, Australia (2009-2011), the use of EventMAP's tools and involvement enabled the University to avoid new construction costs estimated by Victoria University at £70m.
(ii) In another international construction project in Abu Dhabi, UAE, the property developer estimates that EventMAP's involvement saved an estimated £4.6M in reduced real estate construction costs.
(iii) Similarly, EventMAP enabled Imperial College London to achieve savings of around £600k in its South East Quadrant redevelopment project within the impact period.
(iv) EventMAP has solved major planning and timetabling problems for around 15 leading UK and international educational institutions. Among them are three of the Russell Group's top five universities, and Paris-Sorbonne University.
(v) Since 2008 the company's headcount has grown from 2 part time employees to 8 full time and 5 part time employees, and turnover has doubled each successive year.
Poor staff rosters are at the heart of socially-unacceptable working patterns, inadequate rest times and increased levels of stress. They lead to poor productivity, low levels of engagement and additional costs associated with high levels of staff turnover and absenteeism. Research undertaken at City University London has harnessed the power of `Optimisation' techniques to assist managers to draw up good quality staff rosters in hospitals, call centres and other large workforce organisations. The state-of-the-art electronic rostering programme improves use of resources, reduces reliance on costly agency staff, reduces the risk of fines for breaching legal requirements such as the European Working Time Directive and leads to significant savings in the health and social care sectors.
Research on designing mathematical methods for optimisation carried out at the University of Southampton has been fundamental to the development of software solutions for transportation problems and has directly led to the growth and commercial success of the niche software company, Logical Transport. Additional beneficiaries are local councils — who have obtained school bus schedules that typically reduced the number of required vehicles by 10-20% and miles driven by 12-15% and have an information management tool for better decision making — and passengers who have experienced improved service quality.
With global demand for energy ever increasing, environmental impact has become a major priority for the oil industry. A collaboration between researchers at the University of Glasgow and Shell Global Solutions has developed GWSDAT (GroundWater Spatiotemporal Data Analysis Tool). This easy-to-use interactive software tool allows users to process and analyse groundwater pollution monitoring data efficiently, enabling Shell to respond quickly to detect and evaluate the effect of a leak or spill. Shell estimates that the savings gained by use of the monitoring tool exceed $10m over the last three years. GWSDAT is currently being used by around 200 consultants across many countries (including the UK, US, Australia and South Africa) with potentially significant impacts on the environment worldwide.
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.
RTT (Real Time Tomography) scanning systems for airport baggage are becoming increasingly important due to growing air traffic and greater security concerns. Prior to our research, Rapiscan, a leading producer of baggage scanners, had been unable to make full use of the hardware in their latest generation of scanner prototypes. Our novel theory and image reconstruction algorithms are now a core part of a commercially successful 3D scanner that is significantly faster and more accurate than previous generations. The two models, RTT80 and large RTT110, have been approved by regulatory authorities and have already been field trialled at Manchester Airport and deployed at Seattle airport, with further US$20m orders placed.
The research and impact described herein was flagged in the citation for the UoM's 2013 Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education for its work in imaging techniques to support advanced materials and manufacturing.
Visual analytics is a powerful method for understanding large and complex datasets that makes information accessible to non-statistically trained users. The Non-linearity and Complexity Research Group (NCRG) developed several fundamental algorithms and brought them to users by developing interactive software tools (e.g. Netlab pattern analysis toolbox in 2002 (more than 40,000 downloads), Data Visualisation and Modelling System (DVMS) in 2012).
Industrial products. These software tools are used by industrial partners (Pfizer, Dstl) in their business activities. The algorithms have been integrated into a commercial tool (p:IGI) used in geochemical analysis for oil and gas exploration with a 60% share of the worldwide market.
Improving business performance. As an enabling technology, visual analytics has played an important role in the data analysis that has led to the development of new products, such as the Body Volume Index, and the enhancement of existing products (Wheelright: automated vehicle tyre pressure measurement).
Impact on practitioners. The software is used to educate and train skilled people internationally in more than 6 different institutions and is also used by finance professionals.
New optimization routines have been commercialised as a product by the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG). These routines are based on research in the School of Mathematics at the University of Birmingham. NAG has confirmed that their expectation is that they will release this new product, under licence, in Mark 24 of the NAG C Library, to be made available in February 2014. The product is based on the PENNON software code developed by Michal Kocvara (Birmingham) and Michael Stingl (Erlangen). NAG are an international benchmark provider of numerical algorithms and software in mathematics, and as optimization becomes ubiquitous, the novel routines for nonlinear optimization will help NAG attract new customers and bring further benefits to industrial and commercial end users. Inclusion in the NAG Library will mean that this product is actively marketed to the company's worldwide client base which includes many major corporations in the finance sector and engineering industries (44% of NAG's £8.2m turnover in 2012/2013 was outside of the UK).