“When we work with industrial collaborators there is no ‘them’ and ‘us’,” says Prof Nick Jennings from the University of Southampton. “Good communication and a close working relationship were the key reasons why our project was so successful.”
For five years Jennings headed up the ALADDIN project, which involved four universities working together with BAE Systems. The aim of the project was to develop mechanisms, architectures, and techniques to deal with the dynamic and uncertain nature of distributed and decentralised intelligent systems. This involved fundamental research into intelligent algorithms and software that enable autonomous devices to communicate, coordinate and cooperate.
And as this RCUK business case study shows it certainly delivered on its aims. Over its lifespan the project produced more than 150 publications, won a number of awards, produced new disaster simulation platforms, and generated a number of patents and technologies that have been exploited by the associated industrial partners. It has also influenced the way that the EPSRC and BAE Systems manage their academic/industrial research collaborations.
“If a company just throws money at an academic project and reads the final report, it is not getting value for money and this is also not useful for the researchers either,” says Jennings. “On the ALADDIN project our BAE Systems colleagues were our active co-workers. They gave us scientific challenges, evaluated the techniques in their real-world contexts, and made suggestions for improvements that, in turn, required new science. They never stopped us doing anything we wanted to do or stopped us publishing our work.”
From the BAE Systems perspective, ALADDIN provided a model for good practice for collaborative research particularly in terms of the way it specified the high level goals, the way it structured research planning through statements of work and the use of demonstrators to anchor and explain research. It also showed within the company that collaborations addressing fundamental themes can deliver exploitable research.
From EPSRC’s point of view, ALADDIN is used as a model of best practice for new academic‐industrial collaborations.
“The project worked well because over its lifetime, the same key people built up a relationship through regular meetings,” says Jennings. “This constant and regular cooperation and communication with the users of our research not only meant our research outputs were applied effectively, it also helped steer our research in the right direction.”
“Even basic research into algorithms can have applications far beyond those that you can imagine,” says Jennings. “That is why it is so important to work closely with a range of users of your research because they will have ideas for how the work can be applied that I would never have thought of.”