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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.
Prof Irving and Prof Sterling of the Institute of Power Systems at Brunel University collaborated with National Grid (NG) to develop and deploy a Sparse Dual Revised Simplex (SDRS), optimisation engine for real-time power allocation of all generators that were controlled by the NG. Since 2005-6 NG has been using the algorithms to aid in operation of their Balancing Mechanism, which provides a means of adjusting the level of production or consumption of individual generators or demands in the British Electricity Trading and Transmission Arrangements (BETTA). The algorithms enable the Balancing Mechanism (BM) to efficiently adjust outputs of generators in real time in order to balance the demand for electricity at minimum cost. Therefore, providing economic balancing of the transmission system at a scale of 2-3% of the £5bn annual electricity market (approximately £100M-200M per annum), hence about £800 million has been optimally traded in total in the BM since 2008. It is also important to acknowledge the reliability of the algorithms and SDRS optimisation engine from 2006 to present day, as periods of software outage carry high operational costs. The algorithms developed at Brunel continue to have very significant real world impact in terms of financial volume and its reach, such that every transmission scale power generator in the UK participates in the balancing mechanism and by implication every electricity-user benefits.
Our work has facilitated the creation of a variety of innovative control strategies for First Hydro Company (FHC), owner of Europe's largest pump storage plant. FHC's two plants are both supported by the simulation platform developed as part of our research and responsible for balancing load variation on the National Grid. Critically, FHC's business model relies on their ability to provide ancillary services within a short time. Our research produced a comprehensive plant model, and was used to enhance the dynamic response of the Dinorwig station; this resulted in improvement in National Grid stability and has provided competitive advantages to FHC since 2008.
Novel integrated control systems together with their application within a holistic operational strategy have been created as a result of research with Caterpillar. Caterpillar the world's largest manufacturer of high-speed diesel generator sets (gen-sets) has invested [text removed for publication]. This activity yields significant commercial advantage in both performance and efficiency bringing benefits for the environment, through reduced emissions, and major customer operational savings.
Water distribution systems (WDS) are highly complex, spatially distributed networks comprising thousands of different components which deliver drinking water to customers. The impact described here has been achieved in areas of energy management, pressure control and burst detection in WDS. Some developed solutions, such as the model reduction method, model of pump stations and pressure control algorithms, have been widely accepted by the water research community and then filter down to industrial applications or implemented in a widely available shareware. Direct economical and environmental impacts have been achieved by projects for the UK companies with measurable benefits in pounds through reducing water losses and energy consumption as described in Section 4. These include South Staffordshire Water, Aquavent and Scottish Water in the pressure control area and Affinity Water (former Veolia) in the energy management and burst detection areas.
Work undertaken at the Applied DSP and VLSI Research Group since the early/mid nineties, has led to a number of significant contributions underpinning the development and commercial exploitation by industry of power efficient and complexity reduced integrated Digital Signal Processing (DSP) systems and products. These developments have paved the way for a new paradigm in the design of complexity reduced electronic systems aiding the emergence of numerous new commercial application areas and products in a diversity of fields. Indeed, these developments continue their currency and applicability in today's electronic products sector and thus shall be at the core of this case study.
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%.
Ontologies are used to describe the meaning of terms in a domain. Manchester has had a leading role in the design of ontology languages, algorithms and tools. Through standardization, algorithm development and tool creation, we have significantly influenced the uptake of the Ontology Web Language (OWL) and Semantic Web Technologies by public service providers and industry. For example, the NCI thesaurus and SNOMED CT are medical terminologies in OWL; specialised semantic web companies such as Clark & Parsia, Racer Systems and TopQuadrant provide semantic technologies and services that build on OWL; and companies such as Oracle and B2i Healthcare include tool support for OWL.
Effective industrial design and simulation require efficient and versatile computing systems. As a result of research performed by our team experienced in High Performance Computing (HPC), novel software structures and aligned hardware architectures have led to significant benefits to the energy supply industry and to microprocessor manufacturers.
As a result of our research with supercomputing, simulation times for electric field patterns in power components have reduced more than 30-fold, with accurate complex 3-D outputs for an increased range of configurations, thereby enabling our partner company to achieve results not possible with commercial software and to reduce product development costs by $0.5M - $5M p.a.
Our research has been incorporated by Intel into their numerical libraries and now made available to the general public supported by their latest processor architectures. Intel now has a 82% share of processors, according to the November 2013 Top500 list.
The School of Mathematics and Statistics at St Andrews is leading the development and implementation of new efficient algorithms for the GAP (Groups, Algorithms and Programming) free, open-source system for computational discrete algebra. Although it is primarily a research tool, GAP is widely used in education. Therefore lecturers, as well as students in class and beyond, benefit from a whole new range of educational possibilities, for example being able to investigate considerably larger abstract mathematical structures than hitherto. This new, hands-on approach is radically changing the way mathematics is taught in universities worldwide, and is deepening the learning and understanding. The pioneering work of St Andrews researchers has shaped GAP at all levels for 20 years, from discovering and incorporating state-of-the-art algorithms, to its unique design, which is an educational feature in its own right.