Chemical manufacturers focus on new product development as a means of growth, with time to market as the key driver. Analysts state that more structured mechanisms for managing the innovation process must emerge if companies are to extract maximum profitability. Innovation must be placed in a context broader than traditional chemical R&D. New ways of working exploiting dynamic virtual organisational structures are needed.
A recent Specialised Organic Chemicals Sector Association report on its mission to the US concluded that the
UK chemicals sector faces an unprecedented challenge stemming from the convergence of existing technologies as well as from the aggressive implementation of new technologies from the US giving rise to new and highly agile competition. Those companies who choose to ignore key technologies, including information and knowledge management, will fall far behind US competitors in their ability to take a process and product to market.
GOLD is a large project applying Grid technologies to the chemical research and development lifecycle, spanning project launch and laboratory R&D, continuing through to product development, plant commissioning and production hand-over. The overall aim, and a metric for success, is to demonstrate a significant reduction in time to market for new chemical entities through concurrent chemical research and engineering development using Grid middleware as the enabling technology.
data analysis
The GOLD demonstrator VO will be focused on the chemical development lifecycle and will manage the interaction between tasks and entities such as:
•Automated experimental facilities,
•Chemical research and selection
•Safety studies
•Design of the manufacturing process
•Outsourcing of product manufacturing
•Auditing
Applied
Research
32%
Basic
Research
9%
Chemical R&D Funds
Development
59%
GOLD is aimed at reducing the size of the red sections, reducing time and cost to market for chemical R&D projects
The GOLD project emphasises commercial exploitation of Grid technologies and because of this it is imperative to demonstrate not merely technical feasibility but also commercial feasibility for the technology-in-use. The design of all the delivered methods and software will throughout be informed by an investigation of the organisational and management needs of the intended end-users.
A co-ordinating theme of this workpackage will be the definition of informational needs for the management of trust relationships in virtual organisations.
This complex application domain has two dominant characteristics, which have not been explored in previous Grid research:
and a
. Although the GOLD project will build on existing and developing Grid middleware, there are a number of areas where additional research and development is required in order to address the problem. The project has been divided into a number of workpackages, including:
- Trust management
- Workflow
- Security
- Active dynamic information sharing
- Organisational and management research issues