EPSRC PhD Studentships OR and Statistics Centre for OR and Applied Statistics

EPSRC PhD Studentships OR and Statistics Centre for OR and Applied Statistics

Applications are invited from well-qualified, highly motivated students for PhD studentships in the Centre for OR and Applied Statistics at the University of Salford. The Centre is part of Salford Business School and 90% of output was rated “of international standard” at the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. With a healthy postgraduate population, the Centre offers many exciting opportunities for postgraduate training in Operational Research and Statistics.

Students will have the opportunity to attend postgraduate courses that are available through the National Taught Course Centre in OR and the Academy for PhD training in Statistics.

Research projects are offered in the following areas:


Maintenance modelling of complex systems;

Hierarchical forecasting systems.

Descriptions of the projects above are provided below.
The studentships are available through the EPSRC Doctoral Training Scheme. The studentships cover fees and maintenance for UK students, and fees only for EU students, for a minimum period of 3 years.

The maintenance grant offered will be £14,000 per annum. Candidates should have, or expect to obtain, at least a 2:1 honours degree or an MSc in a numeric-related subject such as Mathematics, Statistics or Operational Research.

Further enquiries may be made to Prof. Philip Scarf (tel 0161 295 3817; email: p.a.scarf@salford.ac.uk).

Applications must be made using a standard postgraduate research application form which can be downloaded from http://www.salford.ac.uk/study/postgraduate-research/applying/

Please indicate on your application form that you would like to apply for an EPSRC DTA (CORAS) studentship, and list one of the topics above as your area of study-you do not need to provide a proposal. We will require you to provide references and transcripts. Send your application to p.a.scarf@salford.ac.uk by 26 June 2009.

Maintenance modelling of complex systems
For complex technical systems with many components and that involve many different parties, how to maintain such systems is still a challenging task. This research will address this issue from a systems point of view. The maintenance policy for a technical system is a complex activity that has a huge impact upon the performance of a technical system. To improve the performance of the maintenance of the technical system, we need consider logistics support, spare parts provision, manpower, scheduling and of course the failure characteristics of the system. No single model is capable of dealing with this complex situation, and a high level, systems approach must be adopted, so that modelling techniques such as system dynamics, digital simulations, statistics, and artificial intelligence should be used. Real cases will be studied and a suite of modelling tools will be developed through this study.

Hierarchical forecasting systems
The forecasting needs many companies face nowadays are hierarchical, ranging from the long-term strategic planning, to the medium-term financial and resources allocation, to the thousands of SKUs (stock-keeping units) for production and inventory purposes. The information at different levels should be shared and pooled in order to improve forecasting accuracy. There have been debates on whether the top-down or bottom-up approaches should be used, however, a clear understanding from a theoretical perspective is still lacking. This is a very important research problem to understand how information should be shared at various levels and how forecasts generated at each level can be reconciled. This project will be linked to the research programme of a current EPSRC grant