Projects

The following are examples of projects which the Centre for Complex Cooperative Communicating Systems has been involved in or are currently active :

CICERO

The CICERO project (Control Information system Concepts based on Encapsulated Real-time Objects) was a CERN based research and development project involving both academic institutions and industrial partners. Industrial partners included SpaceBel (Belgium), VTT, IVO and Valmet Automation (Finland), Oblog (Portugal), Science Systems (UK) and UID (Sweden). The project ran from January 1994 to May 1996 and investigated the use of object-oriented techniques and commercial products to address the needs of complex control systems both at CERN and, ultimately, in industry.

Telecommunications Network Management

This is a collaborative research project between CCCS and Motorola European Cellular Infrastructure Division ECID. The project is investigating the use of distributed agent-based technology to manage cellular networks and to represent the state of those networks to operators via user-oriented graphical interfaces.The work is funded both by the government (DTI/EPSRC) and Motorola to a level of £160K over two years. A CASE award has also been given to continue work on a related project and large-scale funding is being sought for proposed follow-on projects.

SCADA

Members of CCCS have recently completed a project with Science Systems (UK) to develop Human Computer Interface, Artificial Intelligence and Open Systems aspects of a SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system which is currently being evolved by the company. This system will be used to control industrial complexes such as electricity production in power stations, distribution of electricity, gas and water and applications in other large scale industrial control processes. CCCS members supervised three Associates in this Teaching Company project which was funded to a level of £330K over 1994-1997 by DTI/EPSRC and Science Systems.

CRISTAL

CRISTAL - Cooperating Repositories and an Information System to Track production and Assembly Lifecycles - is intended to support the distributed systems infrastructure activities behind the construction of the Compact Muon Solenoid (or CMS) experiment to be run at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in the next decade. CRISTAL is a 3-4 year project which was initiated during 1996 and in which CCCS' experience of distributed systems, object-oriented databases and domain knowledge of High Energy Physics computing is important.

Large-Scale Data Mining

The Database Group are a Bristol-based company providing data analysis services to the Direct Marketing industry. The company create data sets for clients from data supplied by the client combined with other commercially available data to create very large data sets. Current data analysis techniques are not able to analyse such large data adequately. This project, funded to a level of £63K over two years by DTI/EPSRC and The Database Group, is applying Genetic Algorithm technology to tackle these problems.