Professor John Quigley from Management Science is co-investigator on a successful three year EPSRC grant application worth £587K led by Professor Jonathon Corney from Design, Manufacturing and Engineering Management (DMEM) and supported by industrial partners Shapespace and the Weir Group. The work is concerned with developing decision support to design engineers through predictive Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems.
The aim of the research is to create software algorithms and identify statistical methods required to enable a "Predictive CAD" system which enhances the productivity of engineering designers. The system will be similar to the familiar predictive text support provided by mobile phones and web searches, in so far as an engineer may partially specify a design and unspecified aspects will be predicted through data mining on historical designs.
Professor Corney has led a successful feasibility project demonstrating high quality statistical data can be generated, characterised and manipulated from a CAD archive to support prediction; scaling up the decision support will be a key challenge in this project.
This is an exciting opportunity for impactful cross faculty collaboration, bringing data analytics and decision support together with design engineering.