Research Associate/Fellow (Fixed-term)

The Resilience Engineering Research Group within the Faculty of Engineering, University of Nottingham, invite applications from enthusiastic researchers to work within a prestigious international team on a project funded by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation (LRF).

This is an exciting and well-resourced project which aims to develop and establish the next generation of prediction methodologies and software tools to perform risk assessment for safety critical systems. The industrial relevance of these methods will be demonstrated through application in the nuclear, railway, and aerospace industries. These tools will overcome deficiencies in the currently available methodologies, which were developed in the 1970’s. The advances address the new technologies used in modern systems and the ways that they are now operated and maintained.

The University of Nottingham leads the project, supported by academics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, and the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). Our industrial partners include: Rolls-Royce, Network Rail, HS1 and RSSB.

The initial stages of the project have developed a methodology, known as Dynamic and Dependent Tree Theory (D²T²) to perform Fault Tree Analysis without the need to assume the independence component failures.  This is achieved by integrating the capabilities of Binary Decision Diagrams, Petri nets and Markov methods. The researcher will be responsible for applying D²T² to systems from the aerospace and railway industries and, where necessary, modifying the algorithms to enable the analysis of system features not previously encountered in case studies from the nuclear industry.  In addition, it is required to extend the D²T² methodology to analyse systems which undergo phased missions. These methods will be implemented in software for efficient utilisation.

Essential skills for the role include:

• Experience of developing fault trees to express the causality of a system failure mode.
• Experience of developing Petri net models to predict the performance of a system module which features dependencies or complex maintenance strategies.
• An understanding of modelling methods which solve Phased Missions.
• A proven record of high-quality publications.

It would be highly advantageous if the candidate had:

• Familiarity with safety assessment and risk modelling.
• Knowledge of the fault tree and event tree methods used in probabilistic safety assessment.
• Experience of developing Markov models to solve system reliability problems.

It is expected that the successful candidate will have an undergraduate degree in an engineering discipline, mathematics, physics or computer science, and in addition, hold (or to be shortly awarded) a PhD in a topic related to the modelling of engineering systems.

The role will require significant interaction with our project collaborators, and the successful candidate must be able to evidence their ability to communicate and develop strong working relationships with both academic and industrial partners.

The post is offered on a fixed term contract, available for 12 months. Hours of work are full time (36.25 hours per week); however applications are also welcome from candidates wishing to work part-time (minimum 14.5 hours per week, over two days). Please specify in your application if you wish to work part time and the number of preferred hours. Job share arrangements may be considered.

Informal enquiries may be addressed to Professor John Andrews, Email: John.Andrews@Nottingham.ac.uk. Please note that applications sent directly to this Email address will not be accepted.

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