IMRC will engage in a broad range of research topics that will benefit a wide range of industrial sectors. Research will cover:- new manufacturing technologies that are capable of providing higher productivity and lower costs; advanced industrial photonics that are seen as key enabling technologies for 21st century manufacturing operations; control and automation at the system and machine level; strategy and performance measures essential for developing efficient manufacturing operations; an examination of innovation developments and technology take-up; design methodologies; and research into the economics and policies the are likely to influence the development of manufacturing operations through the 21st century.

The Innovative Manufacturing and Construction Research Centre (IMCRC) will undertake a wide variety of work in the Manufacturing, Construction and product design areas. The work will be contained within 5 programmes:1. Transforming Organisations / Providing individuals, organisations, sectors and regions with the dynamic and innovative capability to thrive in a complex and uncertain future2. High Value Assets / Delivering tools, techniques and designs to maximise the through-life value of high capital cost, long life physical assets3. Healthy & Secure Future / Meeting the growing need for products & environments that promote health, safety and security4. Next Generation Technologies / The future materials, processes, production and information systems to deliver products to the customer5. Customised Products / The design and optimisation techniques to deliver customer specific products.Academics within the Loughborough IMCRC have an internationally leading track record in these areas and a history of strong collaborations to gear IMCRC capabilities with the complementary strengths of external groups.Innovative activities are increasingly distributed across the value chain. The impressive scope of the IMCRC helps us mirror this industrial reality, and enhances knowledge transfer. This advantage of the size and diversity of activities within the IMCRC compared with other smaller UK centres gives the Loughborough IMCRC a leading role in this technology and value chain integration area. Loughborough IMCRC as by far the biggest IMRC (in terms of number of academics, researchers and in funding) can take a more holistic approach and has the skills to generate, identify and integrate expertise from elsewhere as required. Therefore, a large proportion of the Centre funding (approximately 50%) will be allocated to Integration projects or Grand Challenges that cover a spectrum of expertise.The Centre covers a wide range of activities from Concept to Creation.The activities of the Centre will take place in collaboration with the world's best researchers in the UK and abroad. The academics within the Centre will be organised into 3 Research Units so that they can be co-ordinated effectively and can cooperate on Programmes.

The Centre's themes align with the 'Towards A Data Driven Future' and 'Enabling Intelligence' priority areas, meeting the needs identified by UKRI to provide a highly skilled - and in demand - workforce focused on ensuring positive, human-centred benefits accrued from innovations in data driven and intelligence-based systems. The Centre has a distinct and methodologically challenging "people-first" perspective: unlike an application-orientated approach (where techniques are applied to neatly or simplistically defined problems, sometimes called "solutionism"), this lens will ensure that intense, multi-faceted and iterative explorations of the needs, capabilities and values of people, and wider societal views, challenge and disrupt computational science. In a world of big data and artificial intelligence, the precious smallness of real individuals with their values and aspirations are easily overlooked. Even though the impact of data-driven approaches and intelligence are only beginning to be felt at a human scale, there are already signs of concern over what these will mean for life, with governments and others worldwide addressing implications for education, jobs, safety and indeed even what is unique in being human. Sociologists, economists and policy makers of course have a role in ensuring positive outcomes for people and society of data-driven and intelligence systems; but, computational scientists have a pivotal duty too. Our viewpoint, then, will always see the human as a first-class citizen in the future physical-digital world, not perceiving themselves as outwitted, devalued or marginalised by the expanding capabilities of machine computation, automation and communication. Swansea and the wider region of Wales is a place and community where new understandings of data science and machine intelligence are being formed within four challenging contexts defined in the Internet Coast City Deal: Life Science and Well-being; Smart Manufacturing; Smart and Sustainable Energy; and Economic Acceleration. Studies commissioned by the City Deal and BEIS evidence the science and innovation strengths in Swansea and region in these areas and indicate how transformational investments in these areas will be for the region and the UK. Our Centre will, then, immerse cohorts in these contexts to challenge them methodologically and scientifically. The use of data-driven and intelligence systems in each of the four contexts gives rise to security, privacy and wider ethical, legal, governance and regulatory issues and our Centre also has a cross-cutting theme to train students to understand, accommodate and shape current and future developments in these regards. Cohort members will work to consider how the Centre's challenge themes direct and drive their thinking about data and intelligence, benefitting from both the multidisciplinary team that have built strong research agendas and connections with each of the contexts and the rich set of stakeholders that are our Centre has assembled. Importantly, a process of pivoting between challenge themes will be applied: insights, methods and challenges from one theme and its research projects will be tested and extended in others with the aim of enriching all. These, along with several other mechanisms (such as intra- and inter-cohort sandpits and side projects) are designed to develop a powerful bonding and shaping "cohort effect". The need for and value of our Centre is evidenced by substantial external industrial investment we have have secured: £1,750,000 of cash and £4,136,050 in-kind (total:£5,886,050). These partners and stakeholders have helped create the vision and detail of the proposal and include: Vint Cerf ("father of the internet" and Vice President of Google); NHS; Pfizer; Tata Steel; Ford; QinetiQ; McAfee; Ordnance Survey; Facebook; IBM; Microsoft; Fujitsu; Worshipful Company of IT Spiritual and Ethical Panel; and, Vicki Hanson (CEO, Association of Computing Machinery).

The CDT in Advanced Automotive Propulsion Systems will produce the graduates who will bring together the many technical disciplines and skills needed to allow propulsion systems to transition to a more sustainable future. By creating an environment for our graduates to research new propulsion systems and the wider context within which they sit, we will form the individuals who will lead the scientific, technological, and behavioural changes required to effect the transformation of personal mobility. The CDT will become an internationally leading centre for interdisciplinary doctoral training in this critical field for UK industrial strategy. We will train a cohort of 84 high quality research leaders, adding value to academia and the UK automotive industry. There are three key aspects to the success of the CDT - First, a diverse range of graduates will be recruited from across the range of first degrees. Graduates in engineering (mechanical, electrical, chemical), sciences (physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology), management and social sciences will be recruited and introduced to the automotive propulsion sector. The resulting skills mix will allow transformational research to be conducted. Second, the training given to this cohort, re-enforced by a strong group working ethos, will prepare the graduates to make an effective contribution to the industry. This will require training in the current and future methods (technical and commercial) used by the industry. We also need the graduates to have highly developed interpersonal skills and to be experienced in effective group working. Understanding how people and companies work is just as important as an understanding the technology. On the technology side, a broad system level understanding of the technology landscape and the relationship between the big picture and the graduate's own expertise is essential. We have designed a programme that enriches the student's knowledge and experience in these key areas. Third, underpinning all of these attributes will be the graduate's research skills, acquired through the undertaking of an intensive research project within the new £60 million Institute for Advanced Automotive Propulsion Systems (IAAPS), designed from the outset to provide a rich collaborative environment and add value to the UK economy. IAAPS will be equipped with world leading experimental facilities designed for future powertrain systems and provides dedicated space for industry and academia to collaborate to deliver research valued at over £100 million during the lifetime of the CDT. The cohort will contribute to and benefit from this knowledge development, providing opportunities to conduct research at a whole system level. This will address one of the most pressing challenges of our age - the struggle to provide truly sustainable, affordable, connected, zero emissions transport needed by both industrialised and emerging economies. To enable these benefits we request funding for 40 studentships and the infrastructure to provide a world class training environment. The university will enhance this through the funding of an additional 20 studentships and access to research facilities, together valued at £5 million. Cash and in-kind contributions from industrial partners valued at a total of £4.5 million will enhance the student experience, providing 9 fully funded PhD places and 30 half funded places. The research undertaken by the students will be co-created and supervised by our industrial partners. The people and research outputs that from the CDT will be adopted directly by these industrial partners to generate lasting real world impact.

In the current Circular Economy (CE) landscape, many activities fail to fully realise the potential value of products, components, and materials. Rather than being repaired, reused, or remanufactured, a significant number of products end up in mixed waste streams and are recycled, which is the least valuable end-of-life CE option. This leads to a substantial loss of residual value. One of the critical challenges in the CE is the absence of effective and efficient methods for large-scale separation of products, which are in very different used or end-of-life conditions, into various CE options such as reuse, repair, remanufacture, repurpose, or recycle. The presence of mixed waste streams poses a significant barrier to creating tighter loops of circularity and preserving materials at their highest value for an extended period. The current methods of evaluating end-of-life options are inefficient and inaccurate as they heavily rely on human judgment, which is often based on experience and prone to bias and error. Similar to how triage can help create priorities and organisations in healthcare systems, RoboTriage proposes a new concept, circularity triage, referring to the process of rapidly examining products, components and parts to determine their best CE option, e.g. reuse, repair, remanufacture, repurpose, or recycle. We aim to create and develop robotic systems that can perform circularity triage by capturing the health condition data of used products, allowing for a swift evaluation of product conditions so as to group products of similar conditions, avoid mixed waste streams and recommend the highest-value CE options. RoboTriage has five objectives: O1: To create robotic systems that can perform triage operations (at the operation level). O2: To create system intelligence that enables smart planning of triage operations (task level). O3: To identify new patterns and connections between product history data and product conditions using autonomous large-scale robotic triage (task level). O4: To identify value opportunities and develop circular business models with the new patterns and connections obtained to facilitate high-value retention (system level). O5: To support the uptake of CE and sustainability considerations and practices by industrial partners through three flagship case studies. RoboTriage's academic impact transcends the manufacturing and CE domains, extending to ICT, AI, and data science. The influence of RoboTriage extends into economic, societal, and environmental domains. RoboTriage technologies have the potential to be deployed for CE purposes, thereby enhancing their scale and productivity. On average, a one per cent increase in robot density correlates with a 0.8 per cent increase in productivity. The impact of ideas in RoboTriage will be exemplified by our 11 industrial partners and over £700k contributions (including over £400k cash contributions) from the three host institutions and external partners. Facilitated by RoboTriage technologies, the promotion of high-value CE options such as remanufacturing could lead to a 90% reduction in primary material usage and a 55% reduction in energy and emission impact. The impact of this project will extend to international organisations through our United Nations partners, ITU and UNESCO, both of which are also our project partners.