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Research Programme
As a company founded on the core principle of innovation, pioneering research and development is key to BMT’s success. The company pursues an extensive R&D programme to ensure that its services and products are well informed, appropriately targeted at the challenges set by industry and populated with the highest quality validated data. This work is conducted both in central research activities, through the BMT Institute at Reading University and in the heart of BMT’s commercial operating subsidiaries, combining self funded, joint industry, national and international programmes.
The fruits of BMT’s R&D programmes span all its key market sectors. Environmental information systems, decision support tools, manoeuvring simulation products, new tanker and ice-breaker designs, evacuation modelling, port planning and oil field development analysis are just some of the recent areas where BMT has been able to create significant developments. Research in generic areas such as IPR – for example, intelligent extraction of information on patents – and knowledge management are themes in a number of initiatives in preparation.
Exploitation of research results is vital and across the company there are many examples of services based upon earlier research, including tools which simulate the physical behaviour of systems, for example ship motions, fluid flow, pollutant dispersal, fires, explosions, networks and currents.
Today BMT is investing in enhancements in modelling for engineering design, testing and evaluation of dynamic and control systems, including human factors engineering. Furthermore, BMT has launched new research projects to provide developments for the future – such as systems to assist the automatic berthing of vessels, evacuation of ships in the presence of fire and the forward prediction of position of manoeuvring ships.
BMT’s research is not just aimed at the maritime sector, but also at other areas such as transportation, energy and the environment. In the transportation sector, BMT is working closely with initiatives to develop more sustainable transport solutions and methods of assessing environmental, economic and logistic performance.
BMT has been recognised and commended for its commitment to R&D, with a number of awards for innovation and technical excellence. It is this commitment to innovate and exploit that will keep BMT at the forefront of its business sectors.