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Price Waterhouse Coopers LLP

Price Waterhouse Coopers LLP

7 Projects, page 1 of 2
  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: EP/P006965/1
    Funder Contribution: 10,864,800 GBP

    Our Hub research is driven by the societal need to produce medicines and materials for modern living through novel manufacturing processes. The enormous value of the industries manufacturing these high value products is estimated to generate £50 billion p.a. in the UK economy. To ensure international competitiveness for this huge UK industry we must urgently create new approaches for the rapid design of these systems, controlling how molecules self-assemble into small crystals, in order to best formulate and deliver these for patient and customer. We must also develop the engineering tools, process operations and control methods to manufacture these products in a resource-efficient way, while delivering the highest quality materials. Changing the way in which these materials are made, from what is called "batch" crystallisation (using large volume tanks) to "continuous" crystallisation (a more dynamic, "flowing" process), gives many advantages, including smaller facilities, more efficient use of expensive ingredients such as solvents, reducing energy requirements, capital investment, working capital, minimising risk and variation and, crucially, improving control over the quality and performance of the particles making them more suitable for formulation into final products. The vision is to quickly and reliably design a process to manufacture a given material into the ideal particle using an efficient continuous process, and ensure its effective delivery to the consumer. This will bring precision medicines and other highly customisable projects to market more quickly. An exemplar is the hubs exciting innovation partnership with Cancer Research UK. Our research will develop robust design procedures for rapid development of new particulate products and innovative processes, integrate crystallisation and formulation to eliminate processing steps and develop reconfiguration strategies for flexible production. This will accelerate innovation towards redistributed manufacturing, more personalisation of products, and manufacturing closer to the patient/customer. We will develop a modular MicroFactory for integrated particle engineering, coupled with a fully integrated, computer-modelling approach to guide the design of processes and materials at molecule, particle and formulation levels. This will help optimise what we call the patient-centric supply chain and provide customisable products. We will make greater use of targeted experimental design, prediction and advanced computer simulation of new formulated materials, to control and optimise the processes to manufacture them. Our talented team of scientists will use the outstanding capabilities in the award winning £34m CMAC National Facility at Strathclyde and across our 6 leading university spokes (Bath, Cambridge, Imperial, Leeds, Loughborough, Sheffield). This builds on existing foundations independently recognised by global industry as 'exemplary collaboration between industry, academia and government which represents the future of pharmaceutical manufacturing and supply chain R&D framework'. Our vision will be translated from research into industry through partnership and co-investment of £31m. This includes 10 of world's largest pharmaceutical companies (eg AstraZeneca, GSK), chemicals and food companies (Syngenta, Croda, Mars) and 19 key technology companies (Siemens, 15 SMEs) Together, with innovation spokes eg Catapult (CPI) we aim to provide the UK with the most advanced, integrated capabilities to deliver continuous manufacture, leading to better materials, better value, more sustainable and flexible processes and better health and well-being for the people of the UK and worldwide. CMAC will create future competitive advantage for the UK in medicines manufacturing and chemicals sector and is strongly supported by industry / government bodies, positioning the UK as the investment location choice for future investments in research and manufacturing.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: ES/L001985/1
    Funder Contribution: 14,038 GBP

    Major projects and programmes occur in many aspects of a developed economy, in IT, construction, defence, healthcare and major events, such as the Olympics. Sadly, they seem to be prone to cost overruns, delays and inadequate performance. Although professional bodies, auditors and academics have tried to build up knowledge and tools to help with managing these complex entities, projects and programmes still fail to deliver as expected disappointingly often. We are proposing to take a new approach to the generation and dissemination of knowledge in this field, one that puts the practitioners at the centre of the knowledge generation. Rather than relaying on case studies, which are long-term, very detailed and require highly skilled academic researchers, we propose to develop, extend and apply a technique that is already in use by the software engineering community - patterns. Patterns, in this context, are not a decorative design or motif, but are a structured description of behaviours or problem-solving approaches. At Oxford University, we have been teaching an MSc course on Major Programme Management, and the use of patterns has been enthusiastically endorsed by our students, some of who will be participating in this project. We plan to run six workshops of about 20 people each in Oxford, London, Nottingham and one other location to develop more patterns for PPM (Project and Programme Management). We will launch an interactive website that will host the patterns, and enable the community to debate and develop the patterns. More patterns will be added, and refined, on the website. They will be characterised by attributes such as project size, phase, sector, level in the hierarchy etc. We will prepare a book proposal and a course on patterns. We will learn from our colleagues in software engineering and PPM on the structure of patterns and the organisation of pattern workshops. We are also keen to inquire whether patterns could be a more widely used tool for research in the social sciences, especially in practitioner-led fields. Thus, organisational behaviour, operations management and governance, for example, could all make use of this technique. Therefore, the final workshop of the series will be open to academic colleagues who may be interested in applying these methods in their own domain. This project will have a considerable impact. First, we will address the problem of knowledge development and training in PPM by placing the practitioners at the centre of the knoweldge generating process. We will provide tools and processes that will help them to generate knowledge, discuss it, compare with their lived experience and record these lessons. The impact of this will be the rapid development and deployment of an expanding language of patterns, which will improve the skill level of project and programme managers. The second main impact of the improved quality and timeliness of knowledge generation and dissemination will be an improvement in the quality and delivery of major projects and programmes in the UK and beyond. The annual costs in the UK alone of project delays and cost overruns amount to billions of pounds, so even a 1% improvement would save tens of millions of pounds each year. The third major impact will be the introduction of a new technique for carrying out fieldwork in the social sciences, which can be used to disseminate knowledge from practitioner domains, and contribute to the development and testing of theory.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: EP/P002137/1
    Funder Contribution: 403,756 GBP

    As European Green Capital 2015 and one of the Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities, Bristol has challenged itself to transform by 2065 into a place where citizens 'flourish' by working together to create wellbeing, and achieve this equitably and sustainably. The Bristol Urban Area can legitimately claim to be in the vanguard of such urban transformation, and yet its development pathway remains characterised by paradox, and the need to deal with some stark realities and to challenge a 'business-as-usual' mind-set if progress towards aspirational goals is to be sustained. This proposal addresses a fundamental issue: what is stopping Bristol from bridging the gap between its current situation and the desired future as encapsulated in the City's various visions and aspirations? We have forged a partnership focused on the contiguous City of Bristol and South Gloucestershire urban area. We have secured the full backing of the two local authorities, Bristol Green Capital Partnership and Bristol Health Partners, the LEP, the local business community, citizen groups, and academics from across both Universities, with tangible commitments of support. Dissolving siloes through partnership, and a genuine interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral collaboration, is core to our approach, and hence both Universities have committed to share equally the financial resources with external partners in a three-way split. It is a key strength of this project that we are able to leverage extensively on internationally leading research assets, including: 'Bristol is Open', the FP7-funded Systems Thinking for Efficient Energy Planning (STEEP), the Horizon 2020 REPLICATE project, ongoing work at the £3.5m EPSRC/ESRC International Centre for Infrastructure Futures (ICIF) and co-produced and co-designed research such as the AHRC/ESRC Connected Communities and Digital Economy funded projects including REACT Hub, Tangible Memories and Productive Margins. We also have access to a wealth of highly valuable data sources including the 2015 State of Bristol Report, Bristol's Quality of Life Survey, and the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents & Children that has followed the health of 14,500 local families since the 1990s. We intend to build on the ICIF cognitive modelling approach which identifies the importance of challenging established mental models since these entrench a 'business-as-usual' mind-set. At the heart is co-creation and co-production, and an acknowledgement that citizen behaviour and action are essential to the delivery of desired societal outcomes such as wellbeing, equality, health, learning, and carbon neutrality. The work programme synthesises existing domain-specific diagnostic methodologies and tools to create a novel Integrated Diagnostics Framework. We believe strongly that unless an integrating framework is developed to bring together multiple viewpoints, the diagnosis of urban challenges will remain fragmented and understandings will potentially conflict. We will apply this framework in this pilot project to diagnosis complex problems across four 'Challenge Themes': Mobility & Accessibility, Health & Happiness, Equality & Inclusion and the 'Carbon Neutral' city. We have appointed 'Theme Leaders' who are all 'end users' of the diagnostics, ensuring that the process of investigation is cross-sectoral, interdisciplinary, participatory and grounded in real-world context and application. The legacy of the project will be threefold: firstly innovation in the diagnostic framework and methods needed to address urban challenges; secondly its application to the Bristol urban area and the resulting diagnostics synthesise across the four Challenge Themes; and finally the formation of an embryonic cadre of cross-sector city leaders with the capability to apply integrated diagnostics and challenge the prevailing 'business as usual' approaches.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: EP/N034899/1
    Funder Contribution: 241,076 GBP

    Electricity infrastructure is key to sustain human and economic well-being since it supplies energy to industrial, commercial and financial sectors, critical services (health, traffic control, water supply), communication networks, and hence almost all activities in modern societies. Consequently, the effects of long electricity blackouts have demonstrated impacts on economic activities and social stability and security. A framework for disaster management and resilience of the power sector is needed, beyond the occurrence of "average" outages contemplated in current security standards. This framework should consider network management under the occurrence of natural hazards such as earthquakes and tsunamis that may cause major blackouts, and assess proper measures to manage the associated disasters. Developing and implementing such a framework will be crucial to increase the opportunities for Chile and other countries, especially developing and low-income ones located around the Pacific Ring of Fire which are particularly exposed to the risk of earthquakes and tsunamis. In this context, this project will undertake holistic risk analyses associated with natural hazards on electricity networks along with identification of mitigation and adaptation measures that can allow us to manage the arising disasters. This holistic perspective of disaster management and resilience will be supported by development of mathematical models to firstly assess risks related to high impact low probability events, such as earthquakes and tsunamis, on the electric power systems. These models will then serve to identify an optimal portfolio of preventive and corrective measures that can support mitigation of impacts and compare different adaptation strategies. In particular, besides classical infrastructure reinforcement, we will assess how operational measures for disaster management, for instance though distributed energy systems, e.g., based on communities and microgrids, can provide system resilience. Building on this last point, resilience can in fact also be built through citizens and communities and by how they prepare for, and respond to, power outages. Such preparedness could for instance be led by the electricity companies and targeted at the individual and community levels by sharing accountability for response across the official respondents, local officials, community groups, individual citizens, and the electricity companies. The aim is for households to have response strategies that are complemented by resilience measures prepared for (and by) the community. Such shared responsibility is becoming the response culture in the UK (with the very recent recognition of spontaneous volunteers as a source of untrained, unknown support which converges at the time of an incident). In developing countries, where the capacity of official respondents may be insufficient given the scale of the disaster, the reliance on community preparedness and spontaneous emergence of willing helpers is more acute to lessen the effects of an incident and quicken the return to normality. Thus, in addition to more technical features, the framework developed here will explicitly include community resilience as a way to lessen the impact of outages and manage disasters. By analysing several case studies in Chile based on both data from past experiences and simulations, we will propose a general framework for disaster management and network and community resilience which can be applicable to other developing and low-income countries. We will use the research findings to develop networks standards following disasters along with a standard on community resilience to power outages. These standards will include socio-economic and engineering indicators that can support monitoring of network resilience and readiness to withstand natural, catastrophic events as well as quantifying impacts of such events after they occur, enhancing quality of post-morterm analysis.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: MR/N026721/1
    Funder Contribution: 241,951 GBP

    Electricity infrastructure is key to sustain human and economic wellbeing since it supplies energy to industrial, commercial and financial sectors, critical services (health, traffic control, water supply), communication networks, and hence almost all activities in modern societies. Consequently, the effects of long electricity blackouts have demonstrated impacts on economic activities and social stability and security. A framework for disaster management and resilience of the power sector is needed, beyond the occurrence of "average" outages contemplated in current security standards. This framework should consider network management under the occurrence of natural hazards such as earthquakes and tsunamis that may cause major blackouts, and assess proper measures to manage the associated disasters. Developing and implementing such a framework will be crucial to increase the opportunities for Chile and other countries, especially developing and low-income ones located around the Pacific Ring of Fire which are particularly exposed to the risk of earthquakes and tsunamis. In this context, this project will undertake holistic risk analyses associated with natural hazards on electricity networks along with identification of mitigation and adaptation measures that can allow us to manage the arising disasters. This holistic perspective of disaster management and resilience will be supported by development of mathematical models to, firstly, assess risks related to high impact low probability events, such as earthquakes and tsunamis, on the electric power systems. These models will then serve to identify an optimal portfolio of preventive and corrective measures that can support mitigation of impacts and compare different adaptation strategies. In particular, besides classical infrastructure reinforcement, we will assess how operational measures for disaster management, for instance though distributed energy systems, e.g., based on communities and microgrids, can provide system resilience. Building on this last point, resilience can in fact also be built through citizens and communities and by how they prepare for, and respond to, power outages. Such preparedness could for instance be led by the electricity companies and targeted at the individual and community levels by sharing accountability for response across the official responders, local officials, community groups, individual citizens, and the electricity companies. The aim is for households to have response strategies that are complemented by resilience measures prepared for (and by) the community. Such shared responsibility is becoming the response culture in the UK (with the very recent recognition of spontaneous volunteers as a source of untrained, unknown support which converges at the time of an incident). In developing countries, where the capacity of official responders may be insufficient given the scale of the disaster, the reliance on community preparedness and spontaneous emergence of willing helpers is more acute to lessen the effects of an incident and quicken the return to normality. Thus, in addition to more technical features, the framework developed here will explicitly include community resilience as a way to lessen the impact of outages and manage disasters. By analysing several case studies in Chile based on both data from past experiences and simulations, we will propose a general framework for disaster management and network and community resilience which can be applicable to other developing and low-income countries. We will use the research findings to develop networks standards following disasters along with a standard on community resilience to power outages. These standards will include socio-economic and engineering indicators that can support monitoring of network resilience and readiness to withstand natural, catastrophic events as well as quantifying impacts of such events after they occur, enhancing quality of post-mortem analysing

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