IMPRESS will develop three different prefabricated panels for buildings: (i) a polyurethane based insulated panel with improved thermal performance and light radiation and (ii) a thin, lightweight pre-cast concrete sandwich panel, with optimum thermal and weathering resistance, both of which are suitable for overcladding; (iii) a lightweight pre-cast concrete sandwich panel incorporating Phase Change Materials (PCM) to adapt the thermo-physical properties of the building envelope and enable optimum passive heating and cooling benefits, suitable for recladding. Innovative nano/micro particle based coatings, suitable for 3D printing, will be also developed to achieve anti-corrosion resistance, high mechanical strength, improved solar reflectance, improved ageing resistance and anti-vandalism properties. To create the panels, an innovative manufacturing process will be created that includes Reconfigurable Moulding (RM) techniques, 3D laser scanning and 3D printed technology. In addition, 3D printed microstructured formworks will be developed as permanent external layer for the polyurethane panel to match the existing building aesthetics and provide solar radiation efficiency. The overall manufacturing process will (i) allow for mass production of panels, which take into account complex architectural and aesthetic issues, (ii) allow for faster production while lowering prefabrication costs and (iii) develop new controlled and cost effective solutions. IMPRESS will also develop a new Iterative Design Methodology, which will incorporate all stages of the Design-Construct-Install-Operate process. This will be integrated with a BIM cloud based database focussing on the interoperability between software tools required for the prefabricated process. Furthermore, new penalty based business models will be investigated. The final result will be demonstrated on two existing buildings where final as-built product performance will be validated against the initial design.

Individuals experience significantly more stress from the fear of crime than from any direct experience of it. Sources such as Health Canada maintain that the physical environment (e.g. unused and empty spaces, poorly lit areas, areas obscured with trees and shrubs) contributes to these experiences. As an example, on university campuses, opportunities for attackers to hide can increase student fears. It is extremely challenging, however, to design public spaces that fully alleviate the public's concerns over their safety. This is due to a number of reasons: (i) even the best design processes cannot fully anticipate a user group's needs; (ii) usage patterns by the public are not fully known until the public space has been in use for some time; (iii) usage patterns naturally change over time as the role of the space in the community evolves. As a consequence, despite notable attempts at considering safety in the design of public environments - e.g., Vivacity 2020 - a priori design will never be able to fully satisfy the public's needs.This proposal argues that users of a public space know the space best. It further contends that, at present, only a small proportion of users' views are taken into account during design. Design processes typically include public consultations before construction and post-occupancy evaluation surveys. However, relatively speaking, very few users provide input into these processes. On the other hand, all users have opinions about the spaces in which they live and work. As an example, a worker may mentally note that a pedestrian crossing is required at a busy intersection, but the pressures of modern life mean that s/he is unlikely ever to feed back this comment to the local council. This kind of knowledge - which people possess but may not realize its importance to others - is termed tacit knowledge. The VoiceYourView project aims to mobilise the tacit knowledge of a community to transform public spaces to be safer and more inclusive. The VoiceYourView concept is best illustrated by example. Imagine a park in central England. Mary is 72 years old and walks her dog every day. On her route, at dusk, she hesitates as she walks past a large shrub, fearing what is behind. Judy is 26. Her jogging route takes her into areas of the park that are poorly lit and she is afraid. Paul is 43 and takes his children to the park but is concerned that the bandstand is becoming a magnet for teenage drinking parties. Today, Mary, Judy and Paul each have limited ways of communicating their tacit knowledge to the appropriate people. They would need to compose a letter - which is unlikely given the time stresses on their daily lives. The goal of VoiceYourView is to provide Mary, Judy and Paul with a way to record their feedback in real-time at the moment it occurs to them in the park rather than having to wait until it is forgotten about. In this way, VoiceYourView will collect real-time information that can then be structured, stored in an online repository, and exchanged with appropriate stakeholders: other users, local community groups, local authorities, etc. The hypothesis is that, by so doing, VoiceYourView will lead to public space designs that are more attuned to the needs of their users and, in particular, do a better job at alleviating their safety concerns.We will design inclusive input devices for the collection of tacit knowledge in public spaces and will implement a repository that will use techniques from artificial intelligence (AI) to filter, structure and classify this knowledge. We will conduct a series of trials in key public areas - including Derry city walls and Coventry underpass - to drive and evaluate VoiceYourView research. We will undertake basic research to understand how VoiceYourView requirements are impacted by existing crime trends and how VoiceYourView fits into and influences existing design processes. VoiceYourView is a partnership between five universities and associated partners and wil

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.

The Government's 'Future of Mobility' and 'Road to Zero' strategies outline a second UK transport revolution, characterised by rapid decarbonisation, increased automation and enhanced connectivity. This radical transformation presents both opportunities and challenges for improving air quality over the next two decades, occurring in the context of disruptive changes in transport technology, increasing public environmental awareness and evolving transport behaviours. In this context, actions taken during the emerging transition phase will influence air pollutant sources and exposure patterns across indoor (i.e. vehicle, rail/bus) and outdoor (i.e. pavement, platform, bus station) land transport environments, with profound future implications for public health. We recognise this critical opportunity for encouraging policy foresight, cultivating scientific advancement and stimulating citizen engagement at the air quality, climate and health nexus. Our vision is to establish a diverse interdisciplinary network, connecting researchers across nine UK higher education and research institutions with >20 network partners, comprising commercial, public sector and non-profit organisations. We will establish sustainable connections to undertake co-definition of issues and opportunities and co-delivery of innovative, evidence-based solutions. We will deliver a varied portfolio of network activities including TRANSITION summits, problem-solving workshops, hackathons, discovery studies, site visits, policy engagement events and creative outreach activities at transport locations. Thus the network partners will achieve the ambitious but achievable goal of directly shaping future air quality, climate and transport policy, reflecting the ambitions of the UKRI SPF Clean Air Analysis and Solutions programme.

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.