The ambition of this project is to use a mix of factory activity data to optimise industrial operations, and to identify opportunities and deliver improvements in efficiency, productivity and sustainability. The rapid advance of digital sensing technologies, is making the real time recording of activities in a manufacturing environment both practical and affordable. However, the availability of diverse, real time data about movement and activity does not automatically help engineers manage the complex, dynamic environments typical of modern industrial operations. To do this they need tools that support their interpretation of constantly changing data in ways that enhance productivity and sustainability. In other words, the research challenge posed by digital manufacturing is not the capture of data, but rather the lack of computational methods to analyse large flows of diverse (i.e. multimodal) sensor data and recognise the patterns that allow engineers to assess the current state of the shop floor, understand the impact of past events and predict the consequences of incidents on a range measures. Motivated by this need, the following proposal details a program of work to investigate if the forms of probabilistic networks that have been employed to generate computational models from location tracking data in other contexts (e.g. vehicles movements in traffic models and the daily routines of individuals in domestic environments) can be extended to work with multiple forms of industrial activity data recorded on a factory floor. Such a model would allow diverse signals of manufacturing activity (e.g. material transport, staff movement, vibration, electrical current and air quality etc.) to be used to infer the behaviour of an industrial workplace and generate quantitative measures that support decisions which impact on a sites' production and sustainability performance.

The manufacturing industry, with the drive towards 'Industrie 4.0', is experiencing a significant shift towards Digital Manufacturing. This increased digitisation and interconnectivity of manufacturing processes is inevitably going to bring substantial change to worker roles and manual tasks by introducing new digital manufacturing technologies (DMT) to shop floor processes. At the same time, the manufacturing workforce is itself also changing - globally and nationally - comprising of an older, more mobile, more culturally diverse and less specialist / skilled labour pool. It may not be enough to simply assume that workers will adopt new roles bestowed upon them; to ensure successful worker acceptance and operational performance of a new system it is important to incorporate user requirements into Digital Manufacturing Technologies design. In the past, Human Factors has shaped the tools used in manufacturing, to make people safe, to make work easy, and to make the workforce more efficient. New approaches to capture and predict the impact of the changes that these new types of technologies, such as robotics, rapidly evolvable workspaces, and data-driven systems are required. These approaches consist of embedded sensor technologies for capture of workplace performance, machine learning and data analytics to synthesise and analyse these data, and new methods of visualisation to support decisions made, potentially in real-time, as to how digital manufacturing workplaces should function. The DigiTOP project will develop the new fundamental knowledge required to reliably and validly capture and predict the performance of a digital manufacturing workplace, integrating the actions and decision of people and technology. It will deliver this knowledge via a Digital Toolkit, which will have three elements: i) Specification of sensor integration and data analytics for performance capture in Digital Manufacturing ii) Quantitative analysis of the impact of four industrial Digital Manufacturing use cases iii) Online interactive tool(s) to support manufacturing decision making for implementation of Digital Manufacturing Technologies The DigiTOP project brings together a team with expertise in manufacturing, human factors, robotics and human computer interaction, to develop new methods to capture and predict the impact of Digital Manufacturing on future work. This project will work closely with a range of industry partners, including Jaguar Landrover, BAE Systems, Babcock International and the High Value Manufacturing Catapult to co-create industry-specified use cases to examine. The overall goal of DigiTOP is to produce a toolkit, derived from new fundamental engineering and science knowledge, that will enable industry to increase productivity, support Digital Manufacturing Technology adoption and de-risk the implementation of future Digital Manufacturing Technologies through the consideration of human requirements and capabilities.

Nuclear engineering has returned to the forefront of UK industrial attention with an unprecedented government economic infrastructure spend programme not seen for over 50 years. The combined life extension and new build programmes in Civil Nuclear, running in parallel with life extension and new build in submarine nuclear programmes places a significant demand on an area of engineering already dealing with a National and International skills shortage. Existing and new assets in both civil and naval sectors are important as civil nuclear power accounts for 21% of the UK's electrical generation and nuclear submarines provide the UK's independent continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent. A strategic partnership comprising Babcock International Group, BAM Nutall, Bruce Power, EDF-Energy, Kinectrics, The Weir Group and the University of Strathclyde will establish a nationally significant research programme to increase capability and multidisciplinary expertise focussed on enhanced through-life nuclear asset management. The overall aim of the partnership is two-fold. First, the drive is to create new knowledge and understanding to underpin the operational management/maintenance of existing infrastructure and to improve understanding and knowledge of lifetime and degradation processes. This will significantly increase the life of existing assets, minimise operational risk and reduce through life costs. Second, this novel knowledge can then be fed into the development of the next generation of nuclear plants and equipment, and hence translate these breakthroughs into the design and build of future nuclear assets. In doing this, the partnership will provide game changing knowledge, understanding and technology to deliver significant impact for the partners, the UK economy and global nuclear industry. Additionally it will ensure UK scientific and engineering companies remain at the forefront of global markets. The research in this programme targets low technology readiness level (TRL) advances that are required to support the ambitions of the industry partners and will deliver specific research outcomes which: - Deliver improved understanding and knowledge of lifetime and degradation processes; - Deliver a novel method or system for diagnosing or predicting degradation in plant; - Deliver novel predictive models that allow the lifetime of plant items to be extended; or - Deliver novel solutions to repairing critical plant to allow plant lifetime to be extended. The research programme and the pathway to impact will result in the whole life cycle of nuclear assets being more effectively implemented at a value higher than the sum of the individual parts. Operators will see increases in generation and reductions in costs, resulting in lower cost energy for consumers. As nuclear energy is a carbon neutral energy, investment in nuclear will help decrease CO2 emissions and global warming. The programme targets Energy Security and Efficiency, aiming to meet National Strategic Needs in the Nuclear Sector by investing in nuclear plant life extensions and efficiencies which will help increase electrical generation capacity and reduce the burden on existing electrical assets at a time when the UK faces a shortage in energy and electricity supplies in the coming years. In addition, some of the industry partners' interests span a number of sectors and the research themes in this programme are also highly relevant to other sectors including aerospace, energy and marine. Finally, an additional aim of the programme, relates to development of supply chains to deliver the next generation of technologies and components for nuclear assets. Moreover, as a number of the industrial members of the research centres are non-UK based, outputs from this research programme and subsequent products and services can be exported into international markets. This will lead to UK companies being part of foreign supply chains.

Within the next few years the number of devices connected to each other and the Internet will outnumber humans by almost 5:1. These connected devices will underpin everything from healthcare to transport to energy and manufacturing. At the same time, this growth is not just in the number or variety of devices, but also in the ways they communicate and share information with each other, building hyper-connected cyber-physical infrastructures that span most aspects of people's lives. For the UK to maximise the socio-economic benefits from this revolutionary change we need to address the myriad trust, identity, privacy and security issues raised by such large, interconnected infrastructures. Solutions to many of these issues have previously only been developed and tested on systems orders of magnitude less complex in the hope they would 'scale up'. However, the rapid development and implementation of hyper-connected infrastructures means that we need to address these challenges at scale since the issues and the complexity only become apparent when all the different elements are in place. There is already a shortage of highly skilled people to tackle these challenges in today's systems with latest estimates noting a shortfall of 1.8M by 2022. With an estimated 80Bn malicious scans and 780K records lost daily due to security and privacy breaches, there is an urgent need for future leaders capable of developing innovative solutions that will keep society one step ahead of malicious actors intent on compromising security, privacy and identity and hence eroding trust in infrastructures. The Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) 'Trust, Identity, Privacy and Security - at scale' (TIPS-at-Scale) will tackle this by training a new generation of interdisciplinary research leaders. We will do this by educating PhD students in both the technical skills needed to study and analyse TIPS-at-scale, while simultaneously studying how to understand the challenges as fundamentally human too. The training involves close involvement with industry and practitioners who have played a key role in co-creating the programme and, uniquely, responsible innovation. The implementation of the training is novel due to its 'at scale' focus on TIPS that contextualises students' learning using relevant real-world, global problems revealed through project work, external speakers, industry/international internships/placements and masterclasses. The CDT will enrol ten students per year for a 4-year programme. The first year will involve a series of taught modules on the technical and human aspects of TIPS-at-scale. There will also be an introductory Induction Residential Week, and regular masterclasses by leading academics and industry figures, including delivery at industrial facilities. The students will also undertake placements in industry and research groups to gain hands-on understanding of TIPS-at-scale research problems. They will then continue working with stakeholders in industry, academia and government to develop a research proposal for their final three years, as well as undertake internships each year in industry and international research centres. Their interdisciplinary knowledge will continue to expand through masterclasses and they will develop a deep appreciation of real-world TIPS-at-scale issues through experimentation on state-of-the-art testbed facilities and labs at the universities of Bristol and Bath, industry and a city-wide testbed: Bristol-is-Open. Students will also work with innovation centres in Bath and Bristol to develop novel, interdisciplinary solutions to challenging TIPS-at-scale problems as part of Responsible Innovation Challenges. These and other mechanisms will ensure that TIPS-at-Scale graduates will lead the way in tackling the trust, identity, privacy and security challenges in future large, massively connected infrastructures and will do so in a way that considers wider sosocial responsibility.

Given the unprecedented demand for mobile capacity beyond that available from the RF spectrum, it is natural to consider the infrared and visible light spectrum for future terrestrial wireless systems. Wireless systems using these parts of the electromagnetic spectrum could be classified as nmWave wireless communications system in relation to mmWave radio systems and both are being standardised in current 5G systems. TOWS, therefore, will provide a technically logical pathway to ensure that wireless systems are future-proof and that they can deliver the capacities that future data intensive services such as high definition (HD) video streaming, augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality will demand. Light based wireless communication systems will not be in competition with RF communications, but instead these systems follow a trend that has been witnessed in cellular communications over the last 30 years. Light based wireless communications simply adds new capacity - the available spectrum is 2600 times the RF spectrum. 6G and beyond promise increased wireless capacity to accommodate this growth in traffic in an increasingly congested spectrum, however action is required now to ensure UK leadership of the fast moving 6G field. Optical wireless (OW) opens new spectral bands with a bandwidth exceeding 540 THz using simple sources and detectors and can be simpler than cellular and WiFi with a significantly larger spectrum. It is the best choice of spectrum beyond millimetre waves, where unlike the THz spectrum (the other possible choice), OW avoids complex sources and detectors and has good indoor channel conditions. Optical signals, when used indoors, are confined to the environment in which they originate, which offers added security at the physical layer and the ability to re-use wavelengths in adjacent rooms, thus radically increasing capacity. Our vision is to develop and experimentally demonstrate multiuser Terabit/s optical wireless systems that offer capacities at least two orders of magnitude higher than the current planned 5G optical and radio wireless systems, with a roadmap to wireless systems that can offer up to four orders of magnitude higher capacity. There are four features of the proposed system which make possible such unprecedented capacities to enable this disruptive advance. Firstly, unlike visible light communications (VLC), we will exploit the infrared spectrum, this providing a solution to the light dimming problem associated with VLC, eliminating uplink VLC glare and thus supporting bidirectional communications. Secondly, to make possible much greater transmission capacities and multi-user, multi-cell operation, we will introduce a new type of LED-like steerable laser diode array, which does not suffer from the speckle impairments of conventional laser diodes while ensuring ultrahigh speed performance. Thirdly, with the added capacity, we will develop native OW multi-user systems to share the resources, these being adaptively directional to allow full coverage with reduced user and inter-cell interference and finally incorporate RF systems to allow seamless transition and facilitate overall network control, in essence to introduce software defined radio to optical wireless. This means that OW multi-user systems can readily be designed to allow very high aggregate capacities as beams can be controlled in a compact manner. We will develop advanced inter-cell coding and handover for our optical multi-user systems, this also allowing seamless handover with radio systems when required such as for resilience. We believe that this work, though challenging, is feasible as it will leverage existing skills and research within the consortium, which includes excellence in OW link design, advanced coding and modulation, optimised algorithms for front-haul and back-haul networking, expertise in surface emitting laser design and single photon avalanche detectors for ultra-sensitive detection.