Distributed Information & Automation Laboratory

PhD research opportunities within DIAL

The following PhD research projects are available, under the supervision of Prof. Duncan McFarlane or Dr Ajith Parlikad.

Funding is available to EPSRC levels for UK students, and additional support may be available for those with relevant industrial experience. Initial inquiries should be directed to Sarah Brown (telephone 01223 764306, email sb555@eng.cam.ac.uk). Further details about the application procedure are available here.

Monitoring and Sensing

1. Vehicle health prognostics (predictive maintenance)

This project aims to develop generic techniques to model failures in vehicles, estimate residual life, and to use these models for diagnosis and prognosis.

2. Optimal design of vehicle health monitoring systems

This project aims to develop a robust methodology to design vehicle health monitoring systems using information quality concepts.

3. Return on Investment (ROI) models for vehicle health monitoring

Health monitoring systems come with a cost attached to it. These systems can however reduce costs as well as bring benefits through improved operations and output. Where does the value in health monitoring lie? How can one measure this value? This project aims to develop a tool to identify and quantify ROI for vehicle health monitoring.

Asset Management

1. The role of uncertainty in vehicle maintenance

This projects aims to identify the sources of uncertainty in vehicle maintenance decisions, quantify its impact on decision-effectiveness and explore means to reduce this uncertainty.

2. Optimising service decisions through lifecycle tracking and health-monitoring of assets

This involves examining how product usage history and maintenance history information can be used to improve maintenance schedules, spare parts inventory management, etc. This research topic has the potential to generate multiple PhD projects, each examining a specific decision within the asset lifecycle, or one that provides a holistic model for asset lifecycle decisions.

3. Optimising Information Quality for asset management

The objective of the project is to develop quantitative measures for information quality in the context of asset management decisions and to develop methodologies to optimize information quality throughout the asset lifecycle.

4. Eco-Asset Management

Asset management decision-making almost always focuses on economic optimisation (cost, profit, etc.). This project aims to develop models and techniques to enable asset lifecycle decisions to be made to deliver optimal ecological performance in addition to economic performance. In order to achieve optimality under potentially conflicting constraints, multi-criteria decision-making techniques coupled with traditional decision-theoretic methods will be explored.

5. Asset Lifecycle Simulator

This project aims to develop a simulation tool that can be used to model and analyse lifecycle performance (including physical degradation and failure) of assets.

Smart/Intelligent objects

1. Architectures to support distributed decision-making

One of the key obstacles to widespread adoption of highly networked information systems in today's supply networks is the reluctance of organisations to share information with other supply network partners. The idea of sharing decisions as opposed to sharing information would be a way to overcome this obstacle. This means that organisations that possess or own relevant information will make decisions for other organisations. Such a capability will also reduce data traffic across networks, thereby potentially improving network performance

2. Systems Architectures and technologies required to create "truly smart" objects

Objects that are tagged with low-cost passive RFID tags are able to be identified by readers in their immediate environment and thereby allow application software to track their movements and record or retrieve information about them. However, they are not yet truly smart objects because they lack the intelligence to make decisions and the autonomy to influence their destiny.

Value of Industrial Information

1. Performance analysis of information systems

This project aims to develop decision-theoretic techniques such as influence diagrams to model and analyse the performance of information systems that support asset management decisions. Such a model should help quantify the performance of various information capture, storage, and retrieval approaches.

2. Information Economics in peer-to-peer logistics networks

This project aims to answer the following questions: (i) what is the economic impact of information sharing on the different partners of a peer-to-peer logistics network? (ii) what is the economic impact of information sharing on the holistic performance of the logistics network? (iii) What is the optimum price of information and what are the factors affecting the price of information?

3. Value of information in distributed decision-making

This project aims to develop models to quantify the value of information in a multi-party distributed decision-making scenario.