Local company enters knowledge coupon collaboration with CISS

The Danish Agency for Science Technology and Innovation has a financing arrangement that enables small and medium-sized enterprises that have not collaborated with a certain knowledge institution within the last three years to get financial grants in connection with research and development projects carried out in collaboration with Danish knowledge institutions. The metalworks company AØS has recently entered into a collaboration with CISS concerning the optimisation of ordering steel bars for their production.

Reduced costs

"The challenge for the company is that when they are about to initiate a new project, they order the steel in long bars which are then later cut into smaller pieces depending on what they need. If we are only talking about smaller projects, it is fairly simple to do the calculations concerning how many bars of each available length they need to buy, but the company has grown in recent years and thus also the number and size of the projects the employees need to complete. Therefore, we at CISS were asked to program a tool which can both carry out the calculations for each individual project but which can also combine several projects so that the orders for steel bars can go out at one time - with a consequent reduction of costs and waste of steel," Jacob Illum from CISS explains.

Optimisation and scheduling

AØS' problem is thus a variant of a well-known type of problems within optimisation and scheduling. The challenge for CISS consists of either modifying existing optimisation algorithms or develop entirely new algorithms for solving AØS' problem. The work will be carried out in close collaboration with the company, so that the algorithms are continually tested in relation to the concrete tasks the system is to carry out at AØS, ensuring that CISS can deliver the optimum solution.

Unique offer to small and medium-sized enterprises

"The two financing arrangements offered by The Danish Agency for Science Technology and Innovation, the Knowledge Coupon and the Research Coupon, constitute unique offers to SMEs," Berit Brendborg, information and marketing manager at CISS explains. "Basically, the arrangement is taht the companies can get a price reduction when buying knowledge and when entering research collaborations with the university, which is a great advantage, especially in terms of smaller companies that might not otherwise be able to afford such things - and the offer gives many companies with no prior experience with collaborating with the university the necessary push. The collaboration with AØS is the second knowledge coupon project CISS has initiated, and we have several more in the pipeline. The Knowledge Coupon arrangement is an excellent marketing tool for us in CISS!" she finishes.