Humans organise themselves into teams, companies and communities that realise common purposes and share common values. Manufacturing companies are human centred organisations in which people and machines work collectively to realise (1) products for customers and (2) job opportunities and income for investors and employees. Being organic in nature, manufacturing organisations constitute very complex systems that can be configured in many different ways to demonstrate a vast number of behavioural responses to their environment. Present day approaches used to configure manufacturing organisations are based upon using systematic methods and largely historical knowledge (i.e. of what is known to have worked satisfactorily in similar circumstances). Properly applied this can lead to competitive behaviours; but generally very high cost and long lead-time projects are needed to realise a significant change in configuration and behaviours. Also present day approaches to manufacturing organisation design and change are seldom underpinned by quantitative modelling; so as to facilitate decision making and design optimisation by predicting achievable behavioural responses under yet-to-be encountered environmental conditions.With increased pace of life and therefore rates of change, most companies need to significantly improve their organisation design and change practice. Also new complex system modelling techniques have emerged that have potential to address known deficiencies of present systematic methods. Hence this proposal will research the industry need and the potential of various complementary modelling techniques to satisfy that need. In so doing it will build upon, extend and industrially apply model-driven organisation design and change concepts conceived during recent PhD studies. Computer models of candidate configurations (and their emergent characters and behaviours) will be created that represent key aspects of the realities of four case study manufacturing companies. To achieve sufficient realism and enable model reuse through the lifetime of organisations, model creation will (1) be based on state of the art decomposition and integration principles and (2) need to model characters of people at work in particularly innovative ways. Unifying modelling concepts to be researched include: process decompositons into well specified roles; dynamic producer unit configurations and role assignment; and work pattern dynamics, decompositions and (causal and temporal) flows. Case study modelling will benchmark present and new organisation design and change practice. This project is expected to generate and disseminate significant new knowledge which will be relevant and timely to needs of UK industry and academia.

Please see main (Glasgow) form

The years of 'happy scaling' are over and the fundamental challenges that the semiconductor industry faces, at both technology and device level, will impinge deeply upon the design of future integrated circuits and systems. This proposal brings together semiconductor device, circuit and system experts from academia and industry and e-scientists with strong grid expertise. Only by working in close collaboration, and adequately connected and resourced by e-science and Grid technology, can we understand and tackle the design complexity of nano-CMOS electronics, securing a competitive advantage for the UK electronics industry.Increasing variability in device characteristics and the need to introduce novel device architectures represent major challenges to scaling and integration for present and next generation nano-CMOS transistors and circuits. This will in turn demand revolutionary changes in the way in which future integrated circuits and systems are designed. Strong links must be established between circuit design, system design and fundamental device technology to allow circuits and systems to accommodate the individual behaviour of every transistor on a chip. Design paradigms must change to accommodate this increasing variability. Adjusting for new device architectures and device variability will add significant complexity to the design process, requiring orchestration of a broad spectrum of design tools by geographically distributed teams of device experts, circuit and system designers. This can only be achieved by embedding e-science technology and know-how across the whole nano-CMOS electronics design process and revolutionising the way in which these disparate groups currently work.This project's over-arching aim is to revolutionise existing nano-CMOS electronics research processes by developing the methodology and prototype technology of a nano-CMOS Design Grid. We use the term Grid to encompass computing technologies that allow distributed groups to collaborate by sharing designs, simulations, workflows, data sets and computation resources. This work will require a deep understanding of how electronics scientists, engineers and designers can work together to produce new methods and results. Through this process we will create Grid-savvy nano-CMOS e-Researchers able to Grid-enable their own simulations, to correctly annotate their own data, to design workflows reflecting their design processes, and share all these with other researchers in the nano-CMOS design space.

See Joint Proposal E241901

See Joint Proposal E241901