Public Funding for IBM Limited

This is a pivotal time for UK fashion and textiles. It is essential that the sector strengthens its sustainable competitiveness, needing a fundamental change driven by industrial research and development. With the need to improve the impact of the sector on people and planet, the UK is competing on an international stage. But the prize for those who get there first is two-fold. The winner will enjoy the social and environmental benefits, but also the economic benefit of being a world leader in the provision of circular fashion and textiles. Today, over 1 million tonnes of used textiles are generated annually in the UK. An estimated 1/3 are non-rewearable textiles (NRT) which are currently being lost through export, to be sorted in lower cost labour regions, or to landfill/incineration. The **ACT project** is focused on a solution to overcome these challenges and on achieving Materials Circularity for NRT so they are collected, sorted and processed into feedstock for existing and emerging recycling processes, keeping these resources in circulation. While Product Circularity is equally important, it's widely recognised that fibre to fibre (F2F) recycling is essential for Materials Circularity, replacing the use of virgin resources, and supporting the textile industry in reaching its climate positive targets. However, the used textile supply chain is not currently equipped to supply these facilities. F2F recycling processes exist at different stages of industrialisation and will scale from 2025 onwards, with operating capacities reaching over 50,000 tonnes per annum, per plant. For the UK to benefit economically, environmentally and socially, **the used textiles supply chain is need of radical innovation and advancement. The ACT project is not starting from scratch. Nascent variations of automated sorting approaches are coming to the market from around the globe, with most of the new innovations happening in Europe including in Germany, Belgium, Netherlands and Spain, among others. This project will innovate, combine and advance existing and new supporting technologies to overcome the current market failure by bringing together the most relevant optical sorting technologies, robotics, conveyance and pre-processing techniques into an industrial scale process with development of an Automated Textile Sorting and Pre-processing facility (**ATSP**), solely for NRT of all types. In addition, the project will trial and integrate digital and circularity technologies and services which will be required by brands/retailers, including blockchain and transparency services, product passports and life cycle analyses for the ecosystem. The trials and learnings, from a circular systems perspective, will enable businesses to proactively prepare for new legislation. We envision the outcome from this project, and laying the foundations for a scaled ATSP facility, to unlock real commercial opportunities for all companies actively engaged in accelerating circular supply chains.

The vision for SecQuAL is a secure, quality assured, digitally enabled food ecosystem that will reduce waste, improve decision-making and provide consumers with confidence in the food they purchase and consume. The next best thing since sliced bread! SecQuAL's key objective is to overhaul the food supply chain from farm to fork. SecQuAL addresses current bottlenecks and inefficient paper practices, enables remote regulatory oversight and compliance, provides quality assurance throughout all supply chain links, and enables smart decisions to be made to reduce food waste, reduce carbon emissions as a result of unnecessary transport, and increase consumer confidence in the food purchased and consumed. SecQuAL is innovative because it brings technology to the fore to modernise a complete food ecosystem. It will increase the number of digital technology companies providing solutions for manufacturing industries by bringing together an excellent consortium with partners spanning the full food ecosystem introducing digital technologies to modernise current practices. SecQuAL will simplify a complex industry.

The CAVShield project addresses the urgent global need for academically robust methods and techniques to identify and measure cyber vulnerabilities in fleets of connected vehicles. We are focussing on the connectivity aspects of CAVs in line with the funding theme 2, and not investigating on-board functionality, nor automated driving. CAVShield comprises three interlinked technical Work Packages each producing a report of their findings and recommendations: Methodologies for real-time identification and measurement of vulnerabilities and threats in networks of CAVs. Requirements of cyber test facilities for deployment of these methodologies, independent of vendors and networks, to enable very widespread implementation to protect large vehicle fleets. Long-term commercial viability of cyber-related services to the global CAV industry, built upon the Test Facilities and the best processes methodologies. The CAVShield team includes global leaders in connected vehicle services, world-class expertise in AI for cyber services, UK cyber security experts in UK Government networks and infrastructure, a worldwide supplier of secure IoT networks, and a leading academic institution researching and training in communications, cyber security, and artificial intelligence.

DASH (Delivery As a Service for Highstreets) combines multiple technology & transport partners to create a collaborative, emissions-reducing delivery proposition involving crowd-sourced deliveries & revitalisation of inner-city high-streets via an ‘easy-entry’ B2B & B2C mobile software platform. This enables: (a) utilisation of low occupancy local authority car parks as delivery hubs (X–Doc) for courier operators, with adjacent Electric Vehicle rapid charging infrastructure, (b) operators to reduce inner city courier fleets & replace with multiple crowd-sourced onward delivery options, (c) customers to have variable delivery options (B2B & B2C), (d) a scalable business opportunity for electric cargo bicycles, (e) option for taxi drivers to multi-purpose vehicles, (f) a platform for local independent high-street traders to offer goods for delivery, click & collect & drop-off points, (g) integrated pricing, payment, routing, scheduling & customer parcel tracking options. DASH is an interoperable, scalable platform technology that can be expanded to target multiple freight operators & retailers to maximise socio-economic & environmental impact.

The SWITCH project will understand & model, via new consumer research, data analysis methodologies & tools, the human factors that affect consumers' conversion into different product forms (e.g. laundry detergent powder to liquid) for household goods in key markets: UK, China, and Brazil. We aim to improve our capability, beyond the state of the art, to predict & therefore influence form conversion. This will result in: 1) improved consumer experience (at retail and use); 2) increased product sales of more modern forms which typically have improved environmental impact; 3) market share/category growth. Current limited understanding does not allow us to predict market response to new forms well, resulting in wasted investment. This study will focus on a much wider variety of data, including social media, to glean more insights into our consumers preferred product forms, and what factors would trigger conversion. We will use emerging data analysis techniques to create new mathematical models that will help us predict market conversion readiness. This study can then be reapplied across multiple industries for products that exist in different forms.

Meggitt Modular Modifiable Manufacturing (M4) introduces Object Oriented Manufacturing to the manufacture of highly bespoke, complex, high performance products that characterise UK aerospace manufacturing today. Working with the AMRC and MTC Catapults, and IBM UK, Meggitt will research the application of new manufacturing technologies to provide unprecedented flexibility and utilisation in a next-generation factory environment. AMRC will combine its expertise in advanced manufacturing methods with MTC's expertise in factory automation and control, to develop next generation factory concepts, combining flexible, automated, interactive workstations with real-time optimisation of the overall factory and flow, with autonomous movement of products within the factory. IBM will provide the underlying manufacturing data architecture allowing new levels of process and product analytics, and supporting continuous optimisation of the manufacturing process, at product and factory levels.

Projects in the construction (AEC) sector generally involve collaboration between various participating companies over the (building construction) lifecycle using different systems and storage solutions. As part of this, the compatibility, control and access of data objects created is critical to the success of a project. Currently, coordination between participants is often a labour intensive manual process and can require a monopoly of software systems to be enforced. The C4C project will demonstrate how a multi-vendor Cloud computing system can be used throughout the lifecycle, thereby preventing single vendor lock-in and enabling a variety of Cloud environments, accessible at different costs, to be used. Data sharing through C4C will be managed and provenance-tracked to automate coordination and staged data verification, which will be based on the BIM process model. This approach will also offer a pragmatic, scalable delivery mechanism for the UK BIM agenda to be realised.

Awaiting Public Project Summary

The project focuses on the integration of an electrolyser based refueller with renewable energy; this allows the refueller to act as a demand side management load which enables zero carbon hydrogen to be produced for use as a vehicle fuel, and for the utilization of renewable power. The project will design, build, install and validate two grid-connected hydrogen refuelling platforms on the Isle of Wight, with 100 kg/day and 15kg/day production capacities for the operation of a fleet of hydrogen vehicles. The refuellers will be used in a 12 month trial with FCEV and HICE vehicles. Education and Dissemination activities will target commercial, public and educational sectors.

Awaiting Public Summary

Awaiting Public Summary

Awaiting Public Summary

Awaiting Public Summary

Awaiting Public Summary

Awaiting Public Summary

The project will apply recent research in IEC technologies to the provision of time-critical high volume environmental information in the differing case study sectors of Health and Marine. It will provide a functional demonstrator in each case study using the same underlying Web Services architecture, evaluating standards for interoperability, scalability, data exchange, security and reliability. The DTI funding will bring together technologists, data producers and service providers through these case studies to showcase Web Services, provide technology transfer, promote best practice, and build new partnerships to innovate in priority sectors. The case studies will be used to promote early adoption routes and the technology outputs will add to the national resources in these areas. The projects Dissemination Plan will ensure that the outputs are exploited as widely as possible and that others involved in working with UK environmental data and information (both nationally and internationally) can make use of these research applications.