Professor Rajkumar Roy
Professor of Competitive Design, Head of Manufacturing and Materials Department, and Director of the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Through-life Engineering Services
Location: Building 70, Cranfield campus
E: r.roy@cranfield.ac.uk
T: +44 (0)1234 758555
Manufacturing and Materials
Current activities
Professor Rajkumar Roy is leading the Manufacturing and Materials Department and Director of the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Through-life Engineering Services. The EPSRC Centre will provide world-class capability in the UK to enable industry to deliver high value products with outstanding availability, predictability and reliability with the lowest life cycle cost.
Prior to this, he founded and led the Decision Engineering Centre for over 10 years. Professor Roy has published 58 journal papers and over 120 conference papers. He has successfully supervised 19 PhD thesis and is currently supervising a further 9 PhD researchers jointly with other colleagues. He is the Principal Investigator of four Product-Service System (PSS) and cost engineering (IMRC, EPSRC, Industry and MoD funded) in the areas of concept design, whole life cost modelling, design for service and obsolescence management.
Professor Roy has developed an innovative PSS Futures Lab at Cranfield. He is also the Editor in Chief of the Applied Soft Computing Journal (real life application of fuzzy logic, neural networks and genetic algorithms) from Elsevier. He is one of the Editors of the Journal of Engineering Design from Taylor Francis and Concurrent Engineering Research and Applications (CERA) from Sage Publishers. He is a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of the International Academy for Production Engineers (CIRP), IED, Association of Cost Engineers (ACostE) and is a member of IEEE and Institution of Engineers (India). He is also invited to be a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts for his contribution to design. He was a co-organiser of an IPS2 Spring School at Bochum (Germany) in February 2008. Professor Roy has organised CIRP Design and IPS2 Conferences at Cranfield University in 2009. Professor Roy is also on the steering committee of the Cranfield IMRC and is contributing to the direction and management of the Centre.
Currently Professor Roy is serving on the IET Manufacturing Policy Panel and the National Technical Committee on Advanced Design and Manufacturing. He has also started an annual National Manufacturing Debate at Cranfield and was a judge for the European Strategic Manufacturing Award for 2010.
Key competencies
- Developing whole life cost models for products and services. Identifying and modelling uncertainties involved in cost estimates at the bidding stage
- Real life design and service optimisation
- Real life application of soft computing techniques for modelling and optimisation
- Requirements management methodology development
- Developing innovative product-service systems business models for companies.
Professional activities
- Director and Trustee of the CIRP UK Ltd
- Member of the IET Manufacturing Policy Panel
- Member of the National Technical Committee on Advanced Design and Manufacturing
- Director of the Association of Cost Engineers (ACostE)
- Founding Editor in Chief of 'Applied Soft Computing' Journal from Elsevier Science (Impact Factor 2.415).
- Editor of the Book Series on ‘Decision Engineering’ from Springer Verlag.
- Chairman of the World Federation for Soft Computing (WFSC)
- Editorial Board member of the ‘Journal of Engineering Design’, ‘Production Engineering’ and ‘Concurrent Engineering - Research and Applications’ (CERA) Journal.
Clients
Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems and MoD are major sponsors of Professor Roy’s research along with Corus, Airbus, GE Aviation, Lockheed Martin, BOC Edwards, Nissan, Bentley Motor Company and Ford Motor Company. He has developed a number of long-term collaborative relationships with Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems and the MoD.
Industrial clients:
- BAE Systems
- Ford Motor Company
- Airbus
- Nissan Technology Centre, Europe
- Rolls-Royce
- Honda Research
- Smiths Aerospace
- Johnson Controls
- Lockheed Martin
- Fiat Research
- GKN Aerospace Services
- Corus
- Ministry of Defence
- BT
- Edwards
- Cosworth
- Price Systems
- Galorath
- Cognition.
Funding bodies:
- EPSRC
- IMRC (Cranfield University)
- EU
- Industry
- DTI
- HEFCE.
Background
Professor Roy has led Competitive Design research at Cranfield for fourteen years. Competitive Design is a fact-based approach to studying the whole life of technology intensive products and services and optimising their design, along with efficient design information and knowledge management. He has advocated creative thinking in higher education and has started a number of new initiatives over last ten years, including setting up the Centre for Competitive Creative Design (C4D), a £5.5 million investment from HEFCE, Cranfield University, UAL and EEDA. The Centre aims to embed design thinking across enterprises to improve their creativity and make them more competitive. This is an initiative to link design with science, technology and management. Professor Roy has over 14 years experience in building high performance teams and leading collaborative research and development with industry. In recognition of his leadership, organisational ability and international reputation, he is also elected President of the Association of Cost Engineers (ACostE) (2008-2010) and a Fellow of CIRP. Previously, Professor Roy worked in TELCO (now TATA Motors) for three years and was selected as the Best Graduate Engineer Trainee in 1990.
Selected research grants:
2010 – 2013
Principal Investigator of Rolls Royce/TSB/EPSRC funded project ‘SAMULET: maintenance cost prediction using component life prediction’ (Jointly with Dr Jorn Mehnen)
Financial cont.: £270K
2009 – 2012
Co-Investigator of EPSRC Knowledge Transfer Account – Service and Support Solutions (EP/H500200/1) (led by Cambridge University).
Financial cont.: £217K + one KTP with Rolls-Royce on Design for Service
2008 – 2011
Principal Investigator of IMRC project “Capability based PSS conceptual design”. (Jointly with eight other academics).
Astrium and GSI Group
Financial cont.: £384K
2008 – 2010
Principal Investigator of EPSRC/BAE Systems funded project “Risk and Cost Modelling of Capability Contracts (WP3)” within the ‘Service and Support Solutions: Strategy and Transition (S4T)” (led by Cambridge University).
Financial cont.: £175K
2007 – 2010
Principal Investigator of IMRC funded project “Whole Life Cost Modelling for Product-Service Systems” (Jointly with Dr Essam Shehab)
BAE Systems, GE Aviation, Lockheed Martin (Insys), MoD, Rolls-Royce, Galorath, APMP, SBAC
Financial cont.: ~£380K + + £75K from Industry + in-kind support
2005 – 2008
Principal Investigator of IMRC funded project “Unification of Design, Manufacturing Capability and Service Knowledge in Collaborative Product Development” (Jointly with Professor James Gao).
Rolls-Royce, BOC Edwards
Financial cont.: ~ £298K + 40K (industrial contribution) + in-kind contribution.
Selected PhD supervision:
- Fran Romero Rojo, The development of a methodology to predict whole life cost of of a product-service system with obsolescence (2007 – 2010), PSS-Cost (IMRC project) (BAE Systems, MoD, GE Aviation), (Supervisors: Professor R Roy and Dr Essam Shehab)
- John Erkoyuncu, The development of a framework to incorporate uncertainties and risks in service and support costs within a product-service system (2007 – 2010), PSS-Cost (IMRC project) (BAE Systems, MoD, GE Aviation), (Supervisors: Professor R Roy and Dr Essam Shehab)
- Nancy Doultsinou, The development of a framework for service knowledge capture and reuse for conceptual design (2006 – 2010), UKNOW Project (IMRC funded) (Supervisor: Professor R Roy).
- Victor Oduguwa, Integration of Quantitative and Qualitative Knowledge in Design Optimisation (2003-2007): Corus (Supervisor: Dr R Roy).
- Patrick Oduguwa, Cost Impact Analysis for Requirements Management (2002 – 2006):Nissan European Technology Centre Europe, Johnson Controls – Automotive, EDS and SMMT (Supervisor: Dr R Roy).
- Nikos Giannopoulos, Electronic Part Cost Estimating (2002 – 2006): Ford Motor Company (Supervisor: Dr R Roy).
