Previous Research Projects

Cloud Manufacturing - Towards Resilient and Scalable High Value Manufacturing. The Cloud Manufacturing project investigates how digital technologies can enable ‘on demand’ cloud manufacturing. This means replacing high capital expenditures with pay-as-you-go manufacturing services and through-life support, which radically transforms the economics of new product information, volume manufacturing and lifecycle management. Cloud Manufacturing is a 2.36m project involving the Division of Manufacturing and the School of Computer Science funded by the EPSRC as project number EP/K014161/1.

Evolvable Assembly Systems - Towards Open, Adaptable and Context-Aware Equipment and Systems (EAS). Assembly of final products in sectors such as automotive, aerospace, pharmaceutical and medical industries is a key production process in high labour cost areas such as the UK. To respond to the current challenges manufacturers need to transform current capital-intensive assembly lines into smart systems that can react to external and internal changes and can self-heal, self-adapt and reconfigure. Consequently, there is a need for a radically new approach towards development of future assembly systems able to continuously evolve to respond to changes in product requirements and demand with extremely short set-up times combined with low cost of maintenance, system reconfiguration and capability upgrade with emerging new technologies. As the level and type of automation changes, future assembly systems will also require a different type of engagement of human operators in hybrid decision-making, monitoring and system adaptation. The aim of the EAS project is to is to define and validate the vision and support architecture, theoretical models, methods and algorithms for Evolvable Assembly Systems as a new platform for open, adaptable, context-aware and cost effective production. EAS is a 2.15m project involving the Division of Manufacturing and the School of Computer Science funded by the EPSRC as project number EP/K018205/1.

Verification of Resource-Bounded Multi-Agent Systems (VRBMAS). Agents need resources to act: actions may require energy, time to complete, and other resources depending on the application domain, for example, money. A multi-agent system will have very different behaviours depending on the resource endowment of the agents that comprise it. The aim of this project is to develop tools and techniques for verification of multi-agent systems that explicitly take into account the agents' resource limitations and requirements. This is a collaborative project with Dr Franco Raimondi at the University of Middlesex. The project is funded by the EPSRC as project number EP/E031226.

EDUCATE: Sustainable Energy-Efficient Architectural Design. EDUCATE is a 1.6m euro seven partner project funded under the EU Intelligent Energy Europe II programme coordinated by the School of the Built Environment. EDUCATE will develop a new integrated architectural curriculum in sustainable energy-efficient design. As part of the project, the School of Computer science will develop an e-learning portal which will allow students, educators and building professionals across Europe to collaborate in the development of environmentally sustainable building designs.

Verifying Requirements for Resource-Bounded Agents: the aim of this project is to provide theoretical foundations and practical tools for analysing resource requirements (time, memory, communication bandwidth) for systems of reasoning agents. This is a collaborative project with researchers in the automated reasoning division of ITC-irst. The project is funded by the EPSRC as project number EP/E031226.

Agent-based Integrative Modelling of Bacterial Populations: the aim of this project is to explore the feasibility of using distributed Grid-based simulation techniques for studying complex agent-based models of cell populations. The project will investigate the computational efficiency of biological simulations built using HLA-compliant simulators instantiated and linked using Grid services and, more generally, assess the suitability of the HLA framework for biological modelling. This is a collaborative project with the Centre for Mathematical Medicine at the University of Nottingham. The work is funded by the BBSRC as project number BB/D006619/1.

INSCAPE: Storytelling for Creative People: the aim of this project is to enable ordinary people to interactively conceive, author, publish and experience `interactive stories' in a variety of forms, e.g., theatre, movies, cartoons, puppet shows, video-games, interactive manuals and training simulations. A key component of interactivity is the generation of natural agent behaviours within virtual, augmented and mixed realities. INSCAPE is a 14 partner integrated project, funded by the European Commission under the Sixth Framework Programme as project number 004150.

Agent-based and Continuum Modelling of Populations of Cells. Many biological problems involve a wide range of scales, from, say, an individual gene operating within a cell to a very large population of cells operating in concert. The aim of this project is to develop models of interactions within bacterial populations which capture population scale behaviour and account adequately for the diversity and complexity of individual members of the population. This is a collaborative project with the Centre for Mathematical Medicine at the University of Nottingham. The work is funded by the EPSRC as project number EP/C549406/1.

Model Checking Resource-Bounded Agents was a collaborative project with the Automated Reasoning Division of ITC-IRST in Trento.  The aim of the project is to develop a framework for for model-checking resource bounded agents. This involves designing logics to specify the desired behaviour of resource bounded agents and adapting an existing model checker to verify these properties. The project is funded by the Royal Society.

Large Scale Distributed Simulation on the Grid is an e-Science Sister Project involving the Midlands e-Science Centre of Excellence in Modelling and Analysis of Complex Systems and the Parallel and Distributed Computing Centre, Nanyang Technological University. The long term aim of the project is a "Grid plug-and-play distributed simulation system": a distributed collaborative simulation environment where researchers with different domain knowledge and expertise, possibly at different locations, develop, modify, assemble and execute distributed simulation components on the Grid. The work is funded by the EPSRC as project number GR/S82862/01.

Distributed Optimistic Simulation of Agent-Based Systems is a collaborative project with the Systems, Models and Simulation group at the University of Birmingham. The aim of this project is to develop algorithms and techniques for the parallel distributed simulation of agent-based systems. In particular, it addresses the problems of dynamic state distribution, interest management, load balancing and synchronisation. The long term aim of this work is the development of a generic simulation kernel for the parallel distributed simulation of agent-based systems. However the algorithms and techniques developed are also applicable to the efficient simulation of any system with a large shared state, e.g., ecological modelling, artificial life and computer entertainment and games. The work was funded by the EPSRC, as project number GR/R45338/01.

Real-time Agent Architectures for Believable Worlds: the aim of this project is to develop intelligent agents that can run in real time on limited hardware in complex, dynamic `game-like' or `life-like' simulated environments (e.g., 3D terrain containing objects and other agents) about which only limited information is available and where decisions must be made under time pressure. This work was sponsored by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE).


This file is maintained by Brian Logan
Last modified: 9-Jan-2012, 17:08