The service industries today represent over 70% of all employment in the USA and Europe and this figure is increasing at a significant rate. Even from within the manufacturing sector, organisations view a significant percentage of their efforts being service-related, and increasingly manufacturers are exploring strategies for evolving their product offerings into service-based ones. The overall vision for the research proposed is to establish an academic focus that will inform and lead the continued transformation of the UK economy towards increasing value generation from product related services. It will immediately benefit current practitioners, especially in aerospace and defence through the development and application of related research thinking, and provide a clear academic foundation to lead the development of capability increasingly critical to the UK economy.In April 2007, BAE Systems and EPSRC issued a call for expressions of interest and a proposal in the area of Support Service Engineering Solutions. The call was based on the urgent need to develop research thinking to underpin the transformation of the UK defence industry towards more efficient integrated service-oriented support solutions for complex engineering assets. New research, using both service science research and also strong foundations in manufacturing research as a base, is needed to guide and accelerate emerging practice, and to ensure that engineering and management aspects of this discipline are addressed in parallel with business and strategy issues. Whilst focussed on the defence sector imperative, the research and codification of best practice in integrated solutions is of interest to other sectors where producer manufacturers are looking to the value-add from product based support services such as Transportation, Automotive Services and Healthcare. The research is novel in that it takes a truly multi-disciplined stance in addressing service provision issues within industries underpinned by complex engineering systems.In order to address this growing industrial imperative in an effective manner, a programme divided into five sections / referred to as Work Packages / is proposed. Four Work Packages address issues of importance to the development of support service solutions and a fifth is focussed on ensuring a tight cohesion between the activities and on providing an overall direction for the field. The Work Packages are:WP1 / Organisation Transformation WP2 / Service Information Strategy WP3 / Risk & Cost Assessment WP4 / Combined Maintenance & Capability Enhancement WP5 / Integration & Co-ordinationLed by Professor Duncan McFarlane the programme draws on experienced academics from nine different universities and builds a future model for support service solutions from a multi-dimensional perspective. Programme Investigators:Prof Duncan McFarlane (University of Cambridge)Dr Nigel Caldwell (University of Bath) Dr Richard Curran (Queen's University) Prof Andrew Graves (University of Bath) Prof Michael Henshaw (University of Loughborough) Wg Cdr Chris Hockley RAF (Rtd) (Defence Academy)Prof Alison McKay (University of Leeds) Dr Irene Ng (University of Exeter) Dr. Ken Platts (University of Cambridge) Mr David Probert (University of Cambridge) Prof Rajkumar Roy (University of Cranfield) Dr. Ashutosh Tiwari (University of Cranfield)Prof Wenbin Wang (Salford University) The consortium will address technological, operational and strategic issues and using an integration activity to tie the work together in a comprehensive model. The research will simultaneously develop a blueprint for next-generation industrial service organisations and establish route maps for industrial organisations seeking to make a transition. It will also provide an academic base and leadership for the UK in a research field which is likely to grow significantly in the coming years.

Aviation is estimated to grow by 4.3% p.a. over the next 20 years. Any changes in emissions must be consistent with national, international and industrial climate strategies, which require civil aviation to be carbon neutral by 2050. Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) will play a significant role in meeting these targets, reducing the sector's consumption of fossil fuels. However, the burning of SAF still leads to non-CO2 climate and pollution effects. To quantify these effects requires the full characterisation of particle and gaseous emissions across the whole flight envelope, including ice nuclei (IN) forming potential, and the time evolution of those emissions characterised from a few seconds after released to several days. In addition to non-CO2 SAF climate effects three other key environment uncertainties exist; Emissions from aircraft-engines detrimentally impact local air quality (LAQ), resulting in health effects in areas surrounding airports. Does SAF adoption change LAQ and are there disparities in those communities? Emissions of lubrication oil occur independent of fuel type, but this is not currently regulated or included in models, despite contemporary research indicating potential climate and LAQ impacts. As most SAF testing is ground-based, there is an urgent need to confirm whether use of ground-based emission measurements on tethered engine test-stands adequately represent real-world emissions in-flight. GRIM-SAF (GRound and Inflight Measurements involving SAF) builds upon several existing academic-industrial collaborations, using a unique UK emission engine-test-cell facility. The project will generate contemporary total-emission data from two engine types for a range of conventional & SAFs, both on-ground and during in-flight 'chase' experiments. The project will deliver data essential to improve emission inventories, atmospheric models of climate and weather and LAQ effects, and reduce uncertainties in predicting the impacts of industry-wide adoption of SAF. The objectives are: Comprehensively quantify combustion and lubrication oil emissions, including gases (CO, CO2, NOx, VOC) as well as particulate chemical and physical properties from both conventional and SAFs measured at engine-exit and within the evolving plume. Elucidate the interactions between combustion and lubrication oil emissions and IN forming potential, developing new knowledge of the impact of SAF and lubrication oil on contrail formation. Evaluate the effects of aging and interaction of combustion and oil emissions on LAQ, simulating effects "beyond the airport fence" informing local communities now and in the future. Perform a UK-first in-flight 'chase' emissions experiment to quantify 'real-world' gas and particle emissions at altitude from aircraft using SAF in-flight. Develop empirically validated correlations between ground-based measurements and emissions observed at altitude for conventional and SAFs, enabling the existing International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) emissions data bank to be more accurately used to predict 'cruise' emissions. Outputs and benefits of GRIM-SAF include: The most comprehensive, publicly available, total-emissions database to-date, inclusive of, SAF blend ratio, lubrication oil contribution and engine conditions across full power range of two engine technologies. Key information for policy makers, e.g. local councils and governments when considering town planning and airport expansion applications, to understand the likely impacts of SAF-enabled aviation and oil on LAQ moving toward 2050 and identify possible mitigation strategies. Understanding the relative impacts of different oil venting strategies towards future design of low emissions engines. Insight into whether existing regulatory emissions standards are appropriate for a SAF-fuelled future aviation fleet. Recommendations on whether climate-aviation models should include oil emissions.

Systems engineering has traditionally been an interdisciplinary discipline dominated by aerospace and defence. But there are challenges today that current systems engineering practises fail to meet. A dramatic example of such a failure is the recent cancellation of the U.S. Army $161B Future Combat System, which was the second largest defence programme in the world. Expensive large scale systems are becoming unaffordable. Ever greater efficiency and agility are needed. Systems engineering and defence systems are in a time of change. The community is actively rethinking its concepts and practices as it undergoes dramatic growth. The emergence of Model Driven Architecture (MDA) over the past decade and recent initiatives for model-based systems engineering (MBSE) will play heavily in how the practice of architecture and systems engineering evolves. MBSE has the potential to address the challenges faced by systems engineering, reducing both development time and cost. Put simply, it is an evolution from a document based engineering style to one that is based on formal, traceable, machine readable models developed and used in electronic engineering environments. The MDA paradigm is already delivering significant benefits within software engineering. Cost savings of 30 to 60% have been demonstrated in software development life cycle costs by using MDA instead of traditional methods. Cost savings are just one reason that MDA has been successful in software engineering. Speed and agility in system design, better configuration management, and re-use of models are amongst the other reasons.The RAEng Systems Engineering Research Programme will build on the advances made by MDA in software development over the past decade and apply these advances to MBSE to produce a Next Generation capability that will have far more speed and agility than can be realised by systems engineering today.The Research Chair is properly positioned in the international community to influence the future of systems engineering and is already doing so. The Next Generation of systems engineering is here and now. It is not some future concept; it is not an academic exercise. Advances are already being made by the Research Chair in model driven and transformational methods for architecture and systems engineering that will help to bring MBSE more quickly to the point of practical realisation.

With a reported 5 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, access to communication technologies has reached unprecedented levels and has fundamentally altered the ways in which we experience computational systems. Once delivered through a desktop machine to an office worker, computing has become an interwoven feature of everyday life across the globe in a way that profoundly affects us all. We are now interconnected using mobile devices; we routinely invoke remote services through a global cloud infrastructure and increasingly rely on computational devices in our everyday life. Computational devices monitor our health, entertain us, guide us and keep us safe and secure. However, this explosive growth in these devices and on-line services is only a precursor to an era of ubiquity, where each of us will routinely rely upon a plethora of smart and proactive computers that we carry with us, access at home and at work, and that are embedded into the world around us. As computation increasingly pervades the world around us, it will profoundly change the ways in which we work with computers. Rather than issuing instructions to passive machines, we will increasingly work in partnership with highly inter-connected computational components (aka agents) that are able to act autonomously and intelligently. Specifically, humans and software agents will continually and flexibly establish a range of collaborative relationships with one another, forming human-agent collectives (HACs) to meet their individual and collective goals. This vision of people and computational agents operating at a global scale offers tremendous potential and, if realised correctly, will help us meet the key societal challenges of sustainability, inclusion, and safety that are core to our future. However, these benefits are mirrored by the potential of equally concerning pitfalls as we shift to becoming increasingly dependent on systems that interweave human and computational endeavour.As systems based on human-agent collectives grow in scale, complexity and temporal extent, we will increasingly require a principled science that allows us to reason about the computational and human aspects of these systems if we are to avoid developments that are unsafe, unreliable and lack the appropriate safeguards to ensure societal acceptance.Delivering this science is the core research objective of this Programme. In more detail, it seeks to establish the new science that is needed to understand, build and apply HACs that symbiotically interleave human and computer systems to an unprecedented degree. To this end, it brings together three world-leading academic groups from the Universities of Southampton, Oxford and Nottingham (with multi-disciplinary expertise in the areas of artificial intelligence, agent-based computing, machine learning, decentralised information systems, participatory systems, and ubiquitous computing) with industrial collaborators (initially BAE Systems, PRI Ltd and the Australian Centre for Field Robotics) to collectively establish the foundational scientific underpinnings of these systems and drive these understandings to real-world applications in the critical domains of future energy networks, and disaster response.

The world's oil supply is decreasing rapidly and over the next 10 or 20 years the price per barrel will spiral inexorably. Aviation is a significant consumer of oil and is also implicated in global warming through its generation of massive quantities of carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide. Aircraft noise continues to be an increasingly important problem as airports expand. For these reasons aviation as we know it now will rapidly become unviable. There is no single solution to the problem and enormous changes to engines, airframe design, scheduling and indeed people's expectations of unlimited air travel are inevitable. Here we address one of the most important issues, improved aerodynamics, and develop the underpinning technology for Laminar Flow Control (LFC), the technology of drag reduction on aircraft. This will become the cornerstone of aircraft design. Even modest savings in drag of the order of 10% translate into huge savings in fuel costs and huge reductions in atmospheric pollution. Applications of the technology to military aircraft where range is often the main requirement and marine applications are similarly important. The development of viable LFC designs requires sophisticated mathematical, computational and experimental investigations of the onset of transition to turbulence and its control. Existing tools are too crude to be useful and contain little input from the flow physics. Major hurdles to be overcome concern: a) How do we specify generic input disturbances for flow past a wing in a messy atmosphere in the presence of surface imperfections, flexing, rain, insects and a host of other complicating features b) How do we solve the mathematical problems associated with linear and nonlinear disturbance growth in complex 3D flows c) How do we find a criterion for the onset of transition based on flow physics which is accurate enough to avoid the massive over-design associated with existing LFC strategies yet efficient enough to be useable in the design office d) How can we use experiments in the laboratory to predict what happens in flight experiments e) How can we devise control strategies robust enough to be used on civilian aircraft f) How can we quantify the manufacturing tolerances such as say surface waviness or bumps needed to maintain laminar flow The above challenges are huge and can only be overcome by innovative research based on the mathematical, computational and experimental excellence of a team like the one we have assembled. The solution of these problems will lead to a giant leap in our understanding of transition prediction and enable LFC to be deployed. The programme is based around a unique team of researchers covering all theoretical, computational, and experimental aspects of the problem together with the necessary expertise to make sure the work can be deployed by industry. Indeed our partnership with most notably EADS and Airbus UK will put the UK aeronautics industry in the lead to develop the new generation of LFC wings. The programme is focussed primarily on aerodynamics but the tools we develop are relevant in a wide range of problems. In Chemical Engineering there has long been an interest in how to pump fluids efficiently in pipelines and how flow instabilities associated with interfaces can compromise certain manufacturing processes. In Earth Sciences the formation of river bed patterns behind topology or man-made obstructions is governed by the same process that describes the initiation of disturbances on wings. Likewise surface patterns on Mars can be explained by the instability mechanisms of sediment carrying rivers. In Atmospheric Dynamics and Oceanography a host of crucial flow phenomena are intimately related to the basic instabilities of a 3D flow over a curved aerofoil. Our visitor programme will ensure that our work impinges on these and other closely related areas and that likewise we are aware of ideas which can be profitably be used in aerodynamics.