Coventry City Council and its partners are working on plans to ensure that the city's future is secure and successful. Coventry will demonstrate new and exciting ideas that are designed to benefit both people and businesses. The programme of work, funded by the Technology Strategy Board, will involve the universities, businesses, other partners and citizens. It will focus on challenges such as congestion and energy usage and connect systems together so they work in an improved and more efficient manner.

Awaiting Public Project Summary

Coventry City Council's policy makers have economic growth at the very heart of the city's economic development strategy. Rightly seen as a driver of jobs and wellbeing, Coventry City Council is committed to creating the right conditions for investment. A revitalisation of the city centre is crucial to the success of the strategy as part of a broad based approach that includes a focus on development sites and technology sectors. To this end, Coventry City Council and its public and private sector partners are now engaged in a number of enabling initiatives that will bring real commercial advantages to existing businesses and prospective investors. These include shared space, ultra-fast broadband and open access 4G wireless. Our proposal is to carry out a feasibility study for an interactive shopping rewards programme. It is anticipated that “The Coventry Cloud” would raise the profile of the city centre, increase footfall, enhance the quality of life for residents and visitors, create additional retail spend and attract new high street investors. The innovative and technically advanced methodology would also allow the Council and its city centre retailers to collect and collate a range of data sets that will be used to further define and improve the offer. “The Coventry Cloud” would be a unique and highly innovative rewards programme centred on the regeneration of the city’s retail offer and to combat Coventry’s steep decline in city centre footfall and spend. It is hoped that “The Coventry Cloud” would be designed to empower the retailer through the development of a new socially connected digital system, attracting three key market segments back into Coventry’s high street and provide a vibrant, simple retail and leisure economy that communicates more effectively with the consumer, entertains families of all ages and educates, stimulates and promotes a healthy high street offer. Incorporating both online and offline solutions, “The Coventry Cloud’s” primary goal would be to incentivise visitors and residents for visiting, spending and staying longer in Coventry city centre. The project seeks to establish if Coventry s unique independent retailer offer, incentives and rewards would attract customer loyalty. Working with the main local authority, Coventry City Council, the Coventry City Centre Business Improvement District and private sector partners Serious Games International, “The Coventry Cloud” would provide a social playground designed to enhance virtual experiences using intuitive logistical setup, ground breaking methods of consumer engagement and a simple, customer-friendly approach to accessing retailers and their merchandise 24/7. We enclose a letter of support for the project from Andy Talbot, Director, West Orchards Shopping Centre and Chair of the Coventry Business Improvement District for the city centre. We also have further support letters from other retailers including Marks & Spencers, Debenhams and several from smaller independent retailers.

The purpose of this collaborative research is to further develop the theory of polynomially solvable cases for computationally hard problems of combinatorial optimisation; to investigate special structures in real-life vehicle routing applications; and, in collaboration with practitioners from Coventry City Council, to design, implement and test algorithms that would use the identified special structures to find efficient solutions to practical problems.Combinatorial optimisation (CO) is a field of mathematical programming dealing with optimisation problems defined on discrete structures. The applications of CO are varied, including operations management and logistics, computer-aided design and manufacturing, computational biology and linguistics, etc. The Roadmap for Mathematics in European Industry identifies CO as one of the main research priority areas for the scientific community.The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is one of the classical problems of CO. In simple terms, it can be defined as the problem of designing optimal routes for a fleet of vehicles that has to perform a set of transportation tasks. A large number of businesses and public sector agencies have to deal with the VRP on a regular basis. For instance, Coventry City Council, which is a collaborator in this proposal, has a fleet of vehicles performing various transportation tasks, including domestic waste collection, highway gritting, catering (home meals, school deliveries), as well as various passenger transport services. Most CO problems, including the VRP, are quite simple to define but extremely difficult to solve. In theory, such problems are known as NP-hard, and most likely can only be solved by an exhaustive search if an exact optimal solution is required. All known exact algorithms for such problems have super-polynomial time complexity. Despite great efforts, no polynomial-time algorithm has been found for any NP-hard problem, nor has it been proved that such an algorithm does not exist. Given an NP-hard CO problem, one has essentially the following three options:1. to solve small instances of the problem using a super-polynomial exact algorithm;2. to solve special cases of the problem using a specially designed polynomial-time algorithm;3. to solve the problem approximately, using a polynomial-time approximation algorithm, often called a heuristic.Real-life instances of the VRP are usually sufficiently large to rule out option 1. Moreover, they usually contain various additional constraints that would be difficult (or even impossible) to incorporate into the exact procedure and, therefore, some solutions obtained can be in fact infeasible. Polynomially solvable cases required by option 2 are currently known only for some restricted versions of the VRP, in particular for the traveling salesman problem. So, typically, there is little hope that a real-life vehicle routing problem would fit a known special case. For these reasons, option 3 often remains the only choice. Research papers describing heuristics for the VRP are frequently being published in various journals. The reason is in the practical significance on one hand, and in theoretical difficulties of the problem on the other hand. Since the VRP itself is NP-hard, there is not much hope to find an algorithm which would work satisfactorily for a wide range of problems. The approach we are proposing to investigate in this project aims to identify special structures in real-life VRP applications and to use these structures in designing efficient algorithms. We are planning to combine the advances in the investigation of polynomially solvable cases of NP-hard problems with the practice of constructing heuristics for the VRP, and to develop algorithms and prototype software that would efficiently exploit the identified structures to achieve the best possible solutions.

Coventry UK City of Culture 2021 is a year-long programme of cultural activities and participation. It is being delivered in a partnership between the City of Culture Trust, Coventry and Warwick Universities, and Coventry City Council. UK Cities of Culture are held every four years, the last one was Hull in 2017. What is argued as different about Coventry's year is how it is targeting its activity especially to, first, increase long-term cultural participation in the city and, second, in the belief that such cultural participation can deliver longer term social, economic and environmental benefits to the city. It is argued that the year is a 'city change model', through culture targeted at residents and citizens throughout the city. Activities are much more community-based around the city than the usual big city centre-based spectaculars. Residents are co-creating their ideas of culture and participating in all sorts of local activities in community centres, pubs, clubs, parks and streets - even a graveyard - as well the usual theatres, galleries and other venues. Given the scale, scope and nature of this 'mega-event', there is great interest as to whether Coventry's version of culture-led social and economic development will achieve the benefits and changes for the city it is seeking. Will it become a model of culture-led social and economic development? Led by the two universities, a very large range of research and evaluation studies and quantitative and qualitative data collection has been put in place to research what has happened. Much of this research is innovative in how it will collect evidence and the types of evidence it will use to see if Coventry City of Culture 2021 has made a (lasting) difference to the city. There is much interest across towns, cities and regions as to the experience of Coventry, its research and the evidence it has found - because many places are very interested in culture as a way of regenerating and/or growing their local places as places where residents and people can happily work, rest and play. One example is that twenty places across the UK have submitted Expressions of Interest to be the next City of Culture in 2025. This project will support all this research material on City of Culture 2021 to be engaged with, understood and discussed. A programme of engagement activity is targeted at those organisations and people who bid for and or spend public money on places. Both locally, like Coventry City Council and partners in the city interested in culture but, also, places around the country such as the City of Culture 2025 bidders. The aim is for them to use the new knowledge from the research on culture-led development in their plans and bids for spending on their places. These organisations have been involved in planning a range of knowledge exchange activities for the project which include activities like their own Knowledge Exchange Champions, Lightning Talks, Demonstration Events, Knowledge Cafes/Sandpits, and the facility to ask specific questions of researchers. Led by Coventry University in partnership with the University of Warwick, the project will employ a specialist Knowledge Exchange Officer for 2021 - 2022 with a budget to support this range of activities with local and regional partners such as Coventry City Council, Culture Change Coventry and the City of Culture Trust.