Symbiotic System Ramp-up in Industry 4.0 Environments

Application details
Reference number: WS16
Start date of studentship: 1st October 2019
Closing date of advert: 28th January 2019
Interview date: TBC

Supervisors
Primary supervisor: Pedro Ferreira
Secondary supervisor: TBD

Loughborough University
Loughborough University is a top-ten rated university in England for research intensity (REF2014). In choosing Loughborough for your research, you’ll work alongside academics who are leaders in their field. You will benefit from comprehensive support and guidance from our Doctoral College, including tailored careers advice, to help you succeed in your research and future career.
Find out more: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/supporting-you/research/

Project Detail
The advent of Industry 4.0 is providing changes and challenges to the manufacturing industry. The vision of smart factories, smart products and smart services supported by existing technology is revolutionary, and provides new opportunities to re-think the way we manufacture products.

One of the opportunities is to rethink how system ramp-up is achieved. Ramp-up in manufacturing can be roughly defined as the process of tuning the system to deliver on the necessary performance, both in volume and product quality. This process tends to be expensive and time consuming, and with the growing need for fast system adaptations is becoming a critical cost factor in current systems.

Given that industry 4.0 provides rich data environments, it is expected that this data can provide insights into the ramp-up process. Nevertheless, even with insight little can be done to impact the ramp-up process, unless the solution incorporates the human element. The reason for this, is that the ramp-up process is mainly a human driven manual process.

This project aims to explore the symbiotic potential between human and Cyber-Physical-Devices to deliver a better, faster and more cost effective system ramp-up. One will require the investigation of a seamless integration that explores a symbiotic relationship between humans and Cyber-Physical-Devices, the investigation of machine learning algorithms for generating knowledge related to the ramp-up process, as well as new solutions for enhancing human machine interfaces (sensors, augmented reality, etc.).

Find out more:
https://www.intelligent-automation.org.uk/

Entry requirements
Candidates should hold (or expect to obtain), a first-class or good 2:1 honours degree or a Masters in engineering, operations management, computer science, applied mathematics or a related subject.
Software skills will be quite beneficial for this project, namely java, C#, etc.

Contact details
Name: Pedro Ferreira
Email address: [Email Address Removed]
Telephone number: +44 (0) 1509 227618

How to apply
All applications should be made online at http://www.lboro.ac.uk/study/apply/research/. Under programme name, select ‘Electronic and Electrical Engineering’

Please quote reference number: WS16