Projects
Bioinformatics
This project in the field of biology is creating a world-leading software visualization product. Best-of-breed tools are currently in development that will visualize protein molecules in 3D and animate reaction pathways to show in more detail how chemical interactions occur.
End users are in education and in the pharmaceuticals industry within drug design. Visualization of this kind provides an exceptional teaching tool, allowing both publishers and academics to create effective resources for students. For drug companies, the tools offer a very rapid and cost effective way to assess new ideas, helping with the design and development of new drugs.
Energy saving
Ascent provided technical consultancy and design services for this Irish company, which provides real-time web-enabled energy saving solutions for commercial buildings. A high level of complexity meant that advanced artificial intelligence (AI) techniques were the best fit.
The system 'learns' a building’s precise thermal response to varying outside weather conditions, internal occupancy requirements and building plant responses and behaviour. Proprietary thermodynamic algorithms are then used to minimize energy consumption. A successful commercial launch has now taken place.
Production line
Advanced Genetic Algorithms were used to optimize a production line in this project for a beverage manufacturer. The first step was to prove that the problem was NP-Hard (difficult to solve optimally with conventional algorithms). After doing so, Ascent designed a GA optimizer that gave a good approximate solution. The optimizer was implemented in ABAP in SAP R3 and we provided both technical consultancy and design services. The project was successful and has now been launched commercially.
Airline crew scheduling
Our client for this project was a Swiss company that distributes and manages innovative high-end HR systems. We were asked to design a GA (genetic algorithms) optimizer that could create near-optimal timetables for the crew scheduling of a major airline. The optimizer was implemented and is in use by a major European airline.
The problem was NP-Hard and exceptionally difficult to solve optimally with conventional algorithms. Ascent provided technical consultancy and design services and the project was a commercial success.
Other projects
There are many other successfully completed projects within our special skills unit. Just a few examples are shown below but please ask us if you’d like to know more about a specific area or requirement.
- weather and Tsunami modeling
- economic modeling
- fire simulation
- data mining of medical data
- aerofoil optimization
- arbitrage algorithms for financial markets
- fuzzy logic expert systems in medical applications
