NEWS

Engineering the Future: New Centre Launched to Meet Needs of Industry

University-Industry centre provides practical, high-level training

The University of Leicester has joined a consortium of partners from industry and the university sector to launch a new initiative that will provide practical, high level training for systems engineers of the future.

The Systems Engineering Doctorate Centre is a new initiative from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Council (EPSRC) that will allow candidates to acquire an Engineering Doctorate degree.

"We will be training high-quality engineers who may become future leaders in UK industry. The qualification is a radical alternative to the traditional PhD and is better suited to the immediate needs of industry," said Professor Ian Postlethwaite, Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Leicester.

"We are providing a more vocationally-oriented doctorate in engineering. The research engineers are expected to spend around three quarters of their time working directly with the collaborating company, with the research projects designed and supervised jointly by the academics and the co-operating company."

Professor Postlethwaite said that the new Centre represented a further expansion of Leicester's strategic research capability in Systems Engineering. The University of Leicester already houses a Control and Instrument Group which has an international reputation in the development and application of advanced control system design methods and the construction of novel instrumentation. Much of its research is fundamental and generic with wide applicability across various sectors of industry but particular attention is given to:

• aerospace control, especially UAVs (uninhabited air vehicles)and helicopters
• bioengineering, especially artificial nose technology, computational neuroscience and human control systems
• health management: diagnostics, prognostics and reconfiguration
• software for reliable embedded systems

The group has recently been invited by BAE Systems to be its Preferred Academic Capability Partner in the area of Control Systems, along with Imperial College.

The Systems Engineering Doctorate Centre (SEDC) will be coordinated by Loughborough, but will take the form of a consortium involving four other universities -Leicester, Bath, Queen's Belfast, and Strathclyde and a number of industry organisations. A key industry partner is BAE Systems and a number of other industry partners are already "signed up" to the EngD Centre to provide a wide industrial support base including defence, aerospace, automotive, shipbuilding, power generation and process control.

The SEDC proposal succeeded in competition with bids from seven other UK groups, and the interview panel remarked:

"The panel were very impressed with the application and felt (it) had done a very good job of bringing multiple institutions together that would allow the centre to address the generic issues surrounding systems engineering."

Peter Phillips, Management Head of the Systems Engineering Innovation Centre, also based at Loughbrough, said:

"This is a great opportunity to further consolidate the collaboration between the partners. It will help enhance and accelerate the delivery of a national systems engineering capability and provide the multi-disciplinary skills and leveraged knowledge necessary to deal with our system engineering challenges - challenges that are becoming increasingly common to a wide sector of application domains."