The School of Engineering seeks to appoint a Research Associate in Coastal Ocean Digital Twins. This Research Associate position will contribute to the ILIAD (Integrated Digital Framework for Comprehensive Maritime Data and Information Services) project within the Institute for Infrastructure and Environment at the University of Edinburgh.

The Opportunity:

This Research Associate position will contribute to the contribute to the ILIAD (Integrated Digital Framework for Comprehensive Maritime Data and Information Services) project within the Institute of Infrastructure and Environment at the University of Edinburgh, which is funded by European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under grant agreement No 101037643 and in collaboration with colleagues of the ILIAD DTO consortium.

The broader project is in collaboration with 56 ILIAD partners across 19 countries towards delivering a digital twin product marketplace for maritime applications. The particular role will primarily focus on computational research and the numerical model implementation in developing a digital twin pilot for tidal stream energy, and the necessary architecture to make this transferrable for academic research but also industrial applications. The focus of the role will explore the design of multi-scale and efficiently configured coastal ocean hydrodynamic models for targeted outputs at regional scales. This effort entails the design of compact models that are strategically lightweight to deliver the required information at a constrained processing time. The work will also involve be to packaging modelling infrastructure to: (a) extract information from available databases, e.g. COPERNICUS, to form continuous forcing data to run the modelling as a service, (b) deploy the model on a server to be run on demand, (c) enable the simulation of “what-if” and optimisation scenarios (e.g. effects of changes  in marine technology deployment), and (d) allow the combination with observational data streams that evaluate the performance of the model under transient conditions. This research will be done in collaboration with partners of the ILIAD consortium.