4C BRIDGES THE INDUSTRY GAP

by Che Golden 

The Cork Constraint Computing Centre (4C) celebrated its fourth anniversary
last year and current research projects underway seem to suggest that it has
fulfilled its objectives to bridge the gap between universities and
industry.

Constraint  Programming is a significant growth area and already has wide
commercial application but much remain to  be  done  to  fully  explore  and
exploit the technology. One of  the  overriding  challenges  identified in
the area of innovation  is  the  connection  between  the research community
and the industrial  base.  In this context,  4C  represents  a significant
new resource by providing  considerable  scope  for enhancing the level of
industry-university   collaboration   in   Ireland  and  underpins  this
collaboration  through its Industry Associates Programme. According to Tomas
Nordlander, Staff Scientist and Public Relation Officer, 4C is now the
biggest and one of the leading academic constraint programming labs in the
world, with close to 50 academics, staff and students associated with 4C,
who come from over a dozen countries.

One of the flagship projects that 4C is involved with is the Centre for
Telecommunications Value-Chain Research (CTVR), which focuses on applying a
value chain perspective to research aimed at next generation
telecommunications networks. The project consists of many research strands
involving institutions across Ireland and collaborates with Bell Labs
Ireland at its Blanchardstown site in Dublin. These research establishments
are all focused on different aspects of value in telecommunications, from
the economical design and manufacture of optical photonics equipment, to the
design of flexible and robust supply chains, to issues underlying future use
of radio spectrum. 4C leads a strand called Optimisation and Management,
which concerns decision making at all the stages and levels of a system,
particularly methods for extracting 'best value' across a number of tasks
that span over issues from how to maximize functionality of a physical
telecommunications network, to how telecommunications products should be
produced, tested, and maintained.

The primary funding for 4C comes from Science Foundation Ireland, but 4C
also has attracted support from Enterprise Ireland, the Irish Research
Council for Science, Engineering and Technology and from industrial
partners. 4C has received funding as a participant in a new European Union
project on Enterprise Modelling and Performance Optimisation. This is a
Specific Targeted Research Project (STREP), under the Co-operative research
programme CRAFT that supports small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with
a capacity to innovate but without their own research facilities: a number
of SMEs from different countries with particular R&D problems or needs
assign a significant part of the research activities to R&D 'performers',
such as universities and research centres. The project is led by Dr. Con
Sheehan at the University of Limerick; the PI at 4C is Dr. James Little.
Participants in the project include Irish companies ManOPT Systems, which
produces business and manufacturing software, Burnside Eurocyl Ltd, a
manufacturer of hydraulic cylinders, and Tippo International Ltd, a wood
technology company. The objective of the project is to develop an integrated
Enterprise Modelling and Performance Optimisation tool for SMEs. This
decision support tool will take an enterprise model and transform it into an
optimisation model. From this, a scheduling engine will run and identify the
risks/rewards of the enterprise in terms of its key performance indicators.

Bausch & Lomb Ireland and Enterprise Ireland are also funding a joint
innovation project with 4C to improve their manufacturing processes. The IDA
introduced 4C to Bausch &
Lomb, and with advice from the Technology Transfer Initiative 4C submitted a
successful application to the Enterprise Ireland Innovation Partnership
Programme for a two year project entitled 'Process Design for Efficient
Scheduling'. The research project is now nearing completion and 4C has
developed and implemented an architecture that allows managers to
investigate the relationships between their process design decisions and the
scheduling implications. The system has been built around Constraint
Programming technology, which provides a flexible and expressive way of
generating and modelling problems, and 4C is continuing to extend the
architecture to propose design changes to 'fix' schedules, which are of poor
quality. Instead of leaving it to the manager to come up with new designs,
the system will propose design changes based on automatically generating and
intelligently analysing different schedules. The research so far has
developed case studies involving changes to buffer stock policy, different
raw materials, and increased, and decreased product demands.