Railway safety risk analysis is a very complicated subject where safety is determined by numerous factors including human error. Many railway safety risk assessment techniques currently used are comparatively mature tools. However, in many circumstances, the application of these tools may not give satisfactory results due to the lack of safety risk data or the high level of uncertainty involved in the safety risk data available. It is therefore essential to develop new safety risk analysis methods to identify major hazards and assess the associated risks in an acceptable way in various environments where such mature tools cannot be effectively or efficiently applied. this project study will identify current railway safety risk assessment tools and generic problems to achieving safety risk assessment, and highlight possible ways of overcoming them (i.e. using fuzzy reasoning approach to deal with data and information incomplete and/or inconsistent). The most important problem to achieving railway safety risk assessment has been identified as the decision-making process. The proposed research will also therefore explore the complex issues surrounding the problems at the time of decision-making and develop systematic synthesis method such as analytical hierarchy process (AHP) techniques. This systematic synthesis method will facilitate decision-making in railway operation and maintenance which will be made available to train operators, maintenance engineers and managers, and decision-makers at the earliest stages, which will also further help to promote safety risk thinking within railway industrial companies. The purpose of this proposal is to develop railway safety risk assessment models and a soft computing tool to support railway safety risk analysis in order to show compliance with safety targets and to make maintenance and future investment decisions. This research project will investigate in depth the principal railway safety risk issues and test the proposed safety risk assessment models and tool in a real environment with the industrial partners for appraising operation and maintenance schedules, also diagnosing, using fuzzy reasoning approach (FRA) and analytical hierarchy process (AHP) techniques, which will establish the railway safety risk assessment methodology as an excelenet national, and indeed intational, level. This will provide railway safety risk analysts, operators and engineers and managers with a method and tool to improve their safety management and set safety standards.

Dramatic progress has been made in the past few years in the field of photonic technologies, to complement those in electronic technologies which have enabled the vast advances in information processing capability. A plethora of new screen and projection display technologies have been developed, bringing higher resolution, lower power operation and enabling new ways of machine interaction. Advances in biophotonics have led to a large range of low cost products for personal healthcare. Advances in low cost communication technologies to rates now in excess of 10 Gb/s have caused transceiver unit price cost reductions from >$10,000 to less than $100 in a few years, and, in the last two years, large volume use of parallel photonics in computing has come about. Advances in polymers have made possible the formation of not just links but complete optical subsystems fully integrated within circuit boards, so that users can expect to commoditise bespoke photonics technology themselves without having to resort to specialist companies. These advances have set the scene for a major change in commercialisation activity where photonics and electronics will converge in a wide range of systems. Importantly, photonics will become a fundamental underpinning technology for a much greater range of users outside its conventional arena, who will in turn require those skilled in photonics to have a much greater degree of interdisciplinary training. In short, there is a need to educate and train researchers who have skills balanced across the fields of electronic and photonic hardware and software. The applicants are unaware of such capability currently.This Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) proposal therefore seeks to meet this important need, building upon the uniqueness of the Cambridge and UCL research activities that are already focussing on new types of displays based on polymer and holographic projection technology, the application of photonic communications to computing, personal information systems and indeed consumer products (via board-to-board, chip to chip and later on-chip interconnects), the increased use of photonics in industrial processing and manufacture, techniques for the low-cost roll-out of optical fibre to replace the copper network, the substitution of many conventional lighting products with photonic light sources and extensive application of photonics in medical diagnostics and personalised medicine. Many of these activities will increasingly rely on more advanced systems integration, and so the proposed DTC includes experts in computer systems and software. By drawing these complementary activities together, it is proposed to develop an advanced training programme to equip the next generation of very high calibre doctoral students with the required expertise, commercial and business skills and thus provide innovation opportunities for new systems in the future. It should be stressed that the DTC will provide a wide range of methods for learning for students, well beyond that conventionally available, so that they can gain the required skills. In addition to lectures and seminars, for example, there will be bespoke experimental coursework activities, reading clubs, roadmapping activities, secondments to collaborators and business planning courses.Photonics is likely to become much more embedded in other key sectors of the economy, so that the beneficiaries of the DTC are expected to include industries involved in printing, consumer electronics, computing, defence, energy, engineering, security, medicine and indeed systems companies providing information systems for example for financial, retail and medical industries. Such industries will be at the heart of the digital economy, energy, healthcare and nanotechnology fields. As a result, a key feature of the DTC will be a developed awareness in its cohorts of the breadth of opportunity available and a confidence that they can make impact therein.

Infrastructure is a large part of the UK's assets. Efficient management and maintenance of infrastructure are vital to the economy and society. The application of emerging technologies to advanced health monitoring of existing critical infrastructure assets will quantify and define the extent of ageing and the consequent remaining design life of infrastructure, thereby reducing the risk of failure. Emerging technologies will also transform the industry through a whole-life approach to achieving sustainability in construction and infrastructure in an integrated way - design and commissioning, the construction process, exploitation and use, and eventual de-commissioning. Crucial elements of these emerging technologies will be the application of the latest sensor technologies, data management tools and manufacturing processes to the construction industry, both during infrastructure construction and throughout its design life. There will be a very substantial market for exploitation of these technologies by the construction industry, particularly contractors, specialist instrumentation companies and owners of infrastructure.In this proposal, we seek to create the Innovation and Knowledge Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction that will bring together four leading research groups in the Cambridge Engineering Department and the Computer Laboratory (sensors, computing, manufacturing engineering and civil engineering), along with staff in other faculties - the Judge Business School and the Department of Architecture. The Centre will develop and commercialise emerging technologies which will provide radical changes in the construction and management of infrastructure, leading to considerably enhanced efficiencies, economies and adaptability. We propose to create 'Smart Infrastructure' with the following attributes: (a) minimal disturbance and maximum efficiency during construction, (b) minimal maintenance for new infrastructure and optimum management of existing infrastructure, (c) minimal failures even during extreme events (fire, natural hazards, climate change), and (d) minimal waste materials at the end of the life cycle. The IKC will focus on the innovative use of emerging technologies in sensor and data management (e.g. fibre optics, MEMS, computer vision, power harvesting, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), and Wireless Sensor Networks). These will be coupled with emerging best practice in the form of the latest manufacturing and supply chain management approaches applied to construction and infrastructure (e.g. smart building components for life-cycle adaptive design, innovative manufacturing processes, integrated supply chain management, and smart management processes from building to city scales). It will aim to develop completely new markets and achieve breakthroughs in performance.The business opportunities in construction and infrastructure are very considerable, not only for construction companies but also for other industries such as IT, electronics and materials. The IKC is designed to respond directly and systematically to the input received from industry partners on what is required to address this issue. Through the close involvement of industry in technical development as well as in demonstrations in real construction projects, the commercialisation activities of emerging technologies will be progressed during the project to a point where they can be licensed to industry. The outputs of the IKC will provide the construction industry, infrastructure owners and operators with the means to ensure that very challenging new performance targets can be met. Furthermore the potential breakthroughs will make the industry more efficient and hence more profitable. They will also give UK companies a competitive advantage in the increasingly global construction market.