The proposed research is part of a long-term research agenda to develop High Value Manufacturing (HVM) products with longer functional life and lower whole life cost. The research will deliver to the recently published national strategy on 'engineering services' and a 2025 vision - achieving our goal of 20% reduction in whole life cost with 20% increase in availability during the life of a product across more than £20bn of UK manufacturing sector output. A White Paper on 'Making Things Work. Engineering for life - developing a strategic vision' (Cranfield University, 2015), recognised that the UK has a declining 5% share of a rising global market in 'service and support' that currently exceeds £490 billion. Over 50% of the revenue comes from export. The global market will grow to £710 billion by 2025 [IBISWorld Industry report on Global Engineering Services, 2015]. Despite this there are around 107,000 people working in the "sector" in the UK with average wages 1.5 times those in wider manufacturing [Office of National Statistics (ONS) Data, Dec 2014]. Today more than 50% of revenue in the aerospace and defence sectors comes from the service contracts. For example the Rolls- Royce 'Total Care' contracts and related support activities. The contracts would never have been so successful without underpinning 'through-life performance' research. Both the Foresight Report on 'The Future of Manufacturing: A new era of opportunity and challenge for the UK' (The Government Office for Science, London, 2013) and the White Paper portray the importance of developing engineering services and support capability but recognise there is little underpinning science and good practice available to the extended service supply chain needed for UK competitiveness and productivity. This platform grant will contribute to an increase of around 3% (a total of 8%) in the UK's share of the global market. The aim of the platform grant is to sustain a world leading team with strategic research capability on through-life performance improvement, including complex in-situ degradation assessment technologies. The team between Cranfield and Nottingham Universities have worked together over the last ten years. They have a very strong portfolio of current research projects and publication record, this research will develop the team as an international centre of excellence in 'through-life performance improvement'. This is the only research group internationally focusing on this area in respect of HVM. The grant will accelerate career of the world-class researchers and support them to become internationally leading researchers. Current research capabilities still focus upon single degradation modelling and assessment. There is however, a significant lack of knowledge and models for compound degradation (e.g. the interaction of more than one failure mechanism; corrosion, fatigue and the role temperature plays in modifying the degradation processes). The research will take on a challenge to study and model compound degradations for mechanical components, give feedback on the degradation to design and manufacturing and develop instrumentation to assess (i.e. measure size and depth) the degradations in-situ, including in in-accessible areas. Understanding degradation science better (both single and then compound) is essential to extend the life of mechanical components and therefore availability of the HVM products. In-situ assessment of the compound degradation through very small service access holes will reduce the maintenance cost significantly. The research team will be supported by partner organisations: Rolls-Royce, Bombardier, Network Rail, SMD Ltd, HVM Catapult, XP School. They will directly benefit from the research along with other 500 HVM Companies.

The EPSRC Centre in Coupled Whole Systems is a National Centre, hosted by Cranfield and Durham Universities. Successful high technology UK manufacturing companies are offering a range of interlinked high value products and services. High value products are typically technology intensive, expensive and reliability critical requiring engineering services (e.g. maintenance, repair and overhaul) throughout the life cycle e.g. aircraft engine, high-end cars, railway vehicle, wind turbines and defence equipment. Competitiveness is then dependent on many factors, such as design innovation for the product and added value through the services and minimisation of whole life cost. These products typically combine five major domains (structural, mechanical, electrical, electronic and software sub-systems) to achieve the required functionality and performance. These products are referred to as Coupled Whole Systems. The overall vision of the proposed EPSRC Centre is to develop knowledge, technology and process demonstrators, novel methodologies, techniques and the associated toolsets to provide the capability for the concept design of the coupled whole system based on system design for engineering services.After discussions with the industrial partners, KTNs and all the academics involved in the Centre, it has been decided that the Centre will start with a set of five projects. The projects are of three types, the first one identifies current challenges in the systems design across multiple sectors, the second set of three projects is in TRL levels 2-3 and addresses three major industrial challenges for engineering services across the sectors. This research will develop technology and process demonstrators, design rules and standards to evaluate the system design in order to reduce the engineering services cost later in the life cycle. The third type is more long term and represents TRL levels 1-2. This project will develop technologies that could reduce the need for maintenance and therefore reduce the whole life cost of a high value product. The five initial projects are as follows:Project 1: Study of cross sector challenges in coupled whole systems design (6 mths)Project 2: Reduction of no-fault found (NFF) through system design (3 yrs)Project 3: Characterisation of in-service component feedback for system design (3 yrs)Project 4: Improvement of System Design Process for whole life cost reduction (2 yrs)Project 5: Self-healing technologies for electronic and mechanical components and subsystems (3 yrs)All the initial projects and future ones will use the facilities of a Whole Systems Studio at Cranfield. The Studio will provide instrumentation and facilities to perform experiments in support of the initial and future research projects and develop technology and process demonstrators. The Studio will have a networked computing facility with a data highway based on the OSys integration platform. The platform will initially allow other facilities such as the 3D scanning facility from GOM, Electronics Lab from Durham, IVHM Centre at Cranfield and MRO Shop at Rolls Royce, Derby to be connected with the Studio. In future, other research groups and laboratories will be given access to the Studio as well.The core partners of the Centre are Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems, Bombardier Transport, ARM and the Ministry of Defence (MoD). The partners represent aerospace, defence, railways and electronics sectors. There are 13 other industrial partners representing user companies from defence, information technology (IT), machine tool, and energy sectors and knowledge transfer networks (aerospace, energy and electronics), software vendor, media partner and trade organisations as dissemination partner to support the growth of the Centre.

This Project will start the activities of Shift²Rail members related to the cross-cutting activities. The work Areas socio-economic aspects (WA1) and KPI Monitoring (WA2) as defined in the multi-annual action plan will start. The System Plattform Demonstrator Scenarios will be desigend in a first issue. The objectives of this proposal IMPACT-1 are: - Evaluating the effects for mobility, society and environment induced by new technology solutions and developments, - Introducing relevant targets and needs to create a more attractive, a more competitive and more sustainable rail system - Defining System Platform Demonstrators (SPD) that represent future application use cases - Defining Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that enable the monitoring and assessment of the Shift2Rail overall target achievement. These objectives will be reached by performing a socio-economic impact analysis. Using these results scenarios for the System Platform Demonstrators are described with respect to the railway of the future for