Our Mathematical Sciences department has a long track record of working and partnering with industry and the public sector.
Working together with them has led to wide-ranging impacts on society, with the results of research in our Statistics group being most prominent.
Emulation and history matching in the oil and gas industry
Tempest ENABLE is an oil and gas reservoir simulator package sold by Roxar/Emerson.
The ENABLE software predicts future reservoir performance and optimises field development for the oil industry by providing an emulation, history matching and uncertainty assessment system tailored to their needs.
A key component is the statistical inference engine which was produced and subsequently improved by our mathematicians in the Statistics group, based on their research on uncertainty quantification for complex physical systems modelled by computer simulators.
Professor Ian Vernon has implemented recent advances which have resulted in an order of magnitude improvement in the software performance. This reduces development costs by accelerating the history matching process for oil reservoirs, resulting in vastly improved technical and economic decision-making.
Professor Vernon's work has had substantial impact as ENABLE is currently used globally by more than 16 major oil companies.
Quantifying Uncertainty in Risk Assessment for Food Safety
Professor Peter Craig's research on risk assessment played an important role in the development of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) policy on the treatment of uncertainty in food-related risk assessment.
Professor Craig's work has resulted in new ways to combine data from multiple studies, to properly quantify uncertainties due to limited data and to make quantitative expert judgements in the absence of data.
This has helped increase the transparency of the decision-making process in relation to pesticides and other areas of EFSA's responsibility.
This has led to impact on a variety of EFSA scientific assessments, including dietary intake of sodium, environmental and economic risk from import of plants and plant-based pests, control options for Campylobacter bacteria in poultry farms, and the cumulative risk due to use of multiple pesticides in human food production.
Professor Craig is a member of the EFSA cross cutting Working Group on Uncertainty.
