PhD Studentship - Collaborative Open Platform for PILOTing Services Across Emerging Smart IOT and Edge Computing Environments (COP-PILOT)

Project supervisors: Dr. Amizan Omar, Prof. Vishanth Weerakkody, Dr. Kamran Mahroof

Project Description:

The COP-PILOT Project addresses the evolving edge computing landscape, driven by advanced 5G connectivity and automation needs at the network’s edge, which have spurred the development of private edge systems across industry sectors. The project responds to a growing edge computing market and seeks to maximise the potential of edge intelligence by creating a versatile, collaborative platform that transcends individual infrastructure limitations, offering enhanced security, automation, and intelligence.

COP-PILOT’s vision is to develop an open, collaborative platform for orchestrating end-to-end services across multiple domains. This platform introduces a unique LLM-based user interface for simplified application onboarding and a smart SLA preservation plugin that ensures service continuity through AI-driven intelligence, zero-touch automation, and secure actuation.

The project includes the deployment of four large-scale pilot clusters across Europe, each focusing on edge computing applications in real-world settings like energy, smart cities, agriculture, and manufacturing. These pilots aim to demonstrate improved industrial collaboration and performance while evaluating environmental, societal, and market impacts of cross-sector edge applications, ultimately contributing to advancements in mobility, logistics, and resource management.

We are recruiting a PhD candidate, who will be required to undertake research for a doctoral thesis while assisting the R&D in the COP-PILOT project which is a large multi-partner European Commission-funded project on the development and experimentation of edge computing. The candidate will assist the University of Bradford research team in developing the validation and evaluation framework for the COP-PILOT activities, including the requirements for the COP-PILOT use cases experimentation environment. While doing this, the candidate will be expected to align the R&D work in the project to their PhD research and thesis. This will include developing a systematic approach and framework to assess the validity and reliability of the COP-PILOT architecture, platform, technical components, testbeds, and trials and pilots’ experiments. It involves defining the criteria and standards, and the Key Performance and Value Indicators for evaluating the effectiveness and impact of the COP-PILOT experiments and collecting and analysing data to assess how well the experiments meet these criteria. The candidate will lead the development of the validation and evaluation goals and objectives ensuring they are specific, measurable, achievable, and financially viable; determining the criteria and standards for the evaluation; and defining the methods to collect data for the evaluation, including surveys, interviews, workshops, focus groups, metrics, technical and financial measurements.

The work will involve collaboration with a multi-disciplinary team of industry and academic experts from across Europe and the candidate will be required to travel to pilot sites for data collection. Therefore, there will be opportunities to gain skills in many areas including performance management, project management, and qualitative and quantitative evaluation methods.

Funding notes: This project has full funding for a UK student, which will cover tuition fees, a tax-free stipend of £19,237 per year for living costs, and Research expenses relating to the project.

Funding for: UK Student

Enquiries email name and address:  For informal inquiries, please contact v.weerakkody@bradford.ac.uk;  a.omar4@bradford.ac.uk; research@bradford.ac.uk; k.mahroof@bradford.ac.uk

How to apply: Potential candidates should apply directly online through the online application portal.

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