Thought Leadership event: Prof John McCall, RGU, on "Energy Transition: Transforming the North Sea Supply Chain"

Thought Leadership Event
Speaker: Prof John McCall, National Subsea Centre, Robert Gordon University
Title: Energy Transition: Transforming the North Sea Supply Chain

John McCall is the Professorial Lead in Predictive Data Analytics for the National Subsea Centre at Robert Gordon University. He has researched in machine learning, search and optimisation for 25 years, making novel contributions to a range of optimisation algorithms and predictive machine learning methods, including EDA, PSO, ACO and GA. He has 140+ peer-reviewed publications in books, international journals and conferences. These have received over 2200 citations with an h-index of 22.

John and his research team at RGU specialise in industrially-applied optimization and decision support, working with major international companies including BT, BP, EDF, CNOOC and Equinor as well as a diverse range of SMEs. Major application areas for this research are: vehicle logistics, fleet planning and transport systems modelling; predictive modelling and maintenance in energy systems; and decision support in industrial operations management. John and his team attract direct industrial funding as well as grants from UK and European research funding councils and technology centres.

John is a founding director of two companies: Celerum, which provides consultancy and general optimization software services; and PlanSea Solutions, which focuses on marine planning and logistics.

John has served as a member of the IEEE Evolutionary Computing Technical Committee, an Associate Editor of IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine and the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Journal, and he is currently an Editorial Board member for the journal Complex And Intelligent Systems. He frequently organises workshops and special sessions at leading international conferences. Most recently, he chaired the Workshop on Evolutionary Computation for Permutation Problems (ECPERM) at GECCO 2020.

John has served on a number of industry advisory bodies including the OGTC Academic Panel, and the ScotlandIS - SDS Digital Skills Partnership Advisory Board. He chaired the Education Board of The Data Lab Technology Centre from 2014 – 2017.

Synopsis
The North Sea has, for decades, been a major basin for hydrocarbon exploration and production and still produces around 70MT of hydrocarbon per annum. However with the abundance of marine renewable energy resource and the emerging Blue Economy, the North Sea is now at the heart of the global transition to clean energy generation and a net zero carbon economy.

In this talk John explored how AI and data science can be applied to enable and accelerate this transition. The talk focused on research at Robert Gordon University over recent years to model the complex and fragmented North Sea supply chain, using real operations data. The work has resulted in optimisation algorithms and data science increasingly being embedded in daily operations along the supply chain to the point where £100Ms of efficiency savings are in sight alongside reductions in carbon emissions from operations of up to 40%. John also set this in the broader context of current drivers for transition to Net Zero in the North Sea and some related research and technology challenges.