Supervisors: Dr Sarah Dunnett and Dr Lisa Jackson 

With the move of many manufacturing processes from a product oriented to a service oriented business comes the desire for life-cycle solutions. Improved efficiency is required across the lifecycle, entailing better resource utilisation, increased productivity, increased reusability, improved product quality, improved reliability, prolonged service life, and more cost efficient. This project aims to look at the area of service support reliability.

The challenges to modelling support systems are many and complex including the interaction between the product/process, and the service support system. Since the reliability of the product/process directly determines when and how often corrective maintenance is carried out, as well as being a major factor in determining preventative maintenance schedules, it affects the variation in demand for resources within the support system.

In this project, a model of the service support system will be developed that is able to interact with models of the product/process. This will be integrated with multi objective optimisation procedures to consider maximised output, minimised cost, minimised unreliability etc. The resulting tool will provide the capability to optimise the whole life-cycle of a product/process.

If you are interested in the above project and require further information please contact Dr Sarah Dunnett: s.j.dunnett<στο>lboro.ac.uk

Due to funding restrictions the studentship is available to fund the research for UK/EU nationals. Thestudentship covers tuition fees and provides a tax-free stipend of £13,863 p.a. for a three-year duration. Applicants must hold a good honours degree (first class or an upper second) in Engineering , Mathematics or Computer Science. The start date for the project is expected to be January 2015. Applications can be accessed on line at https://luis.lboro.ac.uk/web_apx/f?p=100:1