Applications of Computing in Industry : Lecture

Ocado is an award winning online retailer that is revolutionising the way people buy their groceries. Ocado has no shops; instead its customers place their orders on the Ocado website or mobile platforms and these are then picked and packed in a huge automated warehouse (the largest of its kind in the world), from where they are then delivered to customers around the country within one hour slots.

Ocado..s automated warehouse has over 25 km of conveyor and at any one time can have more than 6,000 containers on the move under software control. This talk explores the use of discrete event simulation and 3D visualisation techniques to model and unpick this complexity. These models also enable Ocado to step beyond reality and explore the impact on the warehouse of future customer demand, new control algorithms and new hardware, as well as modelling complete new warehouses in their entirety.

Paul Clarke is Head of Mobile, Simulation, Robotics and Data Warehouse Systems at Ocado. After joining Ocado in 2006, Paul initially worked on warehouse control systems and then joined the team designing Ocado..s next highly automated warehouse. After establishing the Simulation and Mobile development teams, Paul then co-wrote Ocado..s award winning iPhone app which remains the only app worldwide from a major retailer supporting a full offline shop. Paul is also heavily involved in the recruitment and induction of software engineers into Ocado Technology.

After graduating in Physics from Oxford, Paul joined the computer consultancy Scicon. During his subsequent career he has worked for a variety of different companies, focusing on the areas such as real-time, embedded and online systems. He has also worked as a freelance consultant and been involved in a number of start-up ventures. In 1982, Paul co-founded Torus Systems which developed an iconic WIMP style environment for the newly launched IBM PC and which was subsequently adopted by IBM as the standard network operating system for their Token Ring network.