What changed?
The Impacts and Benefits
Impacts for the Company
Through the tool, ABL will gain the permanent capacity to support their customer base and policymakers in adopting suitable and effective strategies, business models, investment options, technologies, and actions to achieve decarbonisation targets.
The outcomes of this KTP will be utilised as three distinct service offerings through which ABL intends to work on.
1) Emissions consulting services monitoring, assessment and analysis of an asset/group of assets emissions.
2) licencing to clients who wish to conduct work themselves but who lack the tools to perform it in-house.
3) Decarbonisation projects to incorporate ABL group's existing service offerings, e.g. Engineering via Longitude.
Each of these services will offer a distinct benefit to our clients and allows ABL to offer a flexible and broad service offering to the wider industry. The tool is intended to supplement existing service offerings and in this way, work can be fed through the rest of the organisation, providing benefits not just within the emissions consulting team but to the entire company.
There is additional flexibility in terms of sectors, where the initial focus is on ports, but extends into vessel and other maritime assets. The necessity of the tool to offer flexibility and continued long term development beyond the KTP itself is clear.
Impacts for the Academic Team
We are expecting to publish at least 2 Journal papers (e.g. Ocean Engineering/Journal of Applied Energy/Journal of Cleaner Production) and attend up to two conferences (e.g. Transport Research Arena/International Conference on Maritime Logistics) as part of this project. We expect this KTP to lead to an industrial impact case study for REF 2029.
The close cooperation with ABL and understanding their customer base business model, challenges and opportunities will also create new collaboration opportunities. We are hoping to identify several research themes focusing on the lessons learned and gaps identified during this project. This KTP will help the University to validate the developed approaches and solutions in the real-world environment which can also be implemented in shipbuilding, manufacturing, and shipping companies in the future.
This project will also support the teaching activities:
* At Strathclyde, 'real-world' examples for the related modules for problem-based learning experiences for our students.
* 4th-year Marine/Naval Engineering individual projects and 5th-year Group design projects, which will help to recruit PhD students to perform fundamental research on maritime decarbonisation.
Impacts for the KTP Associate
I’m learning how to utilise simulation and develop software in a real-world business scenario. Engaging with stakeholders and incorporating the experiences into the development lifecycle has given me valuable perspectives on user needs and operational challenges. Working across two universities and a company, I’m exposed to a unique blend of academic research and commercial application, which sharpens both my technical and strategic thinking.
Internal knowledge sharing is helping me to better grasp corporate software development methods, renewable energy systems, and emission calculation techniques—fields becoming more and more crucial in the sustainability driven environment of today. This exposure is aiding me to create software that satisfies corporate objectives and matches environmental concerns.
The structured training in management, finance, and leadership from the KTP program is educating me on how to communicate effectively, manage projects, and take decisions. Overall, the program is accelerating my journey to becoming a multi-faceted software engineer with a good grasp of technical as well as organisational dynamics.