Thales UK Research Articles

MADE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE

Thales UK CEO and Chairman Alex Cresswell believes that current and future challenges will provide opportunities for engineers that are too good to miss

Supporting Organizing for Disruptive Innovation in an Incumbent Organization in Real-Time

This article contributes to underdeveloped research methods for studying innovation processes in real-time by exploring how organizing for disruptive innovation in an incumbent organization can be supported through real-time investigation. Embracing an ethnographic engaged scholarship approach, we worked with participants at Thales UK , a leading multinational technology company, over a period of 3 years to explore how an incumbent organization organizes for disruptive innovation from an organization-creation perspective. We show how our collaborative research practices supported the development of disruptive opportunities in their emergence by stimulating self-reflexivity and imagination among organizational members. Our reflexive analysis illustrates how we accomplished this through a process of simultaneous intervention and observation, action and analysis, and iteratively moving in and out between micro and macro levels of engagement with our study context. We present our findings in the form of a confessional tale highlighting both the impacts and tensions of engaging with our research context in a multidimensional and responsive manner. We seek to bridge theory and practice of innovation processes through our engaged scholarship approach and by sharing our research experience as a toolkit for other researchers to also study and contribute to the emergence of innovation processes in organizations in real-time.

Interview

interview

Charting a Course for Autonomy

Thales UK chief executive Victor Chavez spoke to Andrew Wade about maritime autonomy, cybersecurity, skills and Brexit

Complexity in a Systems Engineering Organization: An Empirical Case Study

ABSTRACTSystems Engineering development projects often fail to meet delivery expectations in terms of timescales and cost. Project plans, which set cost and deadline expectations, are produced and monitored within a reductionist paradigm, incorporating a deterministic view of cause and effect. This assumes that the cumulative activities and their corresponding durations that comprise the developed solution can be known in advance, and that monitoring and management intervention can ensure satisfactory delivery of an adequate solution, through implementation of this plan.This paper presents a case study that examines the Systems Engineering function within a Thales UK business line. The focus is the organization. The research is exploratory. It gathers evidence through participant‐observation, interviews, documentation, and archival records. It considers two perspectives, a ‘traditional’ predominantly reductionist perspective, and a novel Complex Adaptive System (CAS) perspective. Evidence is analyzed in light of both perspectives to consider how each is able to explain the observations.Research that considers an organization as a CAS is predominately theoretical, rather than empirical. This paper contributes by viewing a systems engineering development organisation as a CAS, and considering the novel insights this perspective brings to the issue of satisfactory project delivery.

Compact, diode-pumped, solid-state lasers for next generation defence and security sensors

Low-cost semiconductor laser diode pump sources have made a dramatic impact in sectors such as advanced manufacturing. They are now disrupting other sectors, such as defence and security (D&S), where Thales UK is a manufacturer of sensor systems for application on land, sea, air and man portable. In this talk, we will first give an overview of the market trends and challenges in the D&S sector. Then we will illustrate how low cost pump diodes are enabling new directions in D&S sensors, by describing two diode pumped, solid- state laser products currently under development at Thales UK. The first is a new generation of Laser Target Designators (LTD) that are used to identify targets for the secure guiding of munitions. Current systems are bulky, expensive and require large battery packs to operate. The advent of low cost diode technology, merged with our novel solid-state laser design, has created a designator that will be the smallest, lowest cost, STANAG compatible laser designator on the market. The LTD delivers greater that 50mJ per pulse up to 20Hz, and has compact dimensions of 125×70×55mm. Secondly, we describe an ultra-compact, eye-safe, solid-state laser rangefinder (LRF) with reduced size, weight and power consumption compared to existing products. The LRF measures 100×55×34mm, weighs 200g, and can range to greater than 10km with a single laser shot and at a reprate of 1Hz. This also leverages off advances in laser pump diodes, but also utilises low cost, high reliability, packaging technology commonly found in the telecoms sector. As is common in the D&S sector, the products are designed to work in extreme environments, such as wide temperature range (-40 to +71°C) and high levels of shock and vibration. These disruptive products enable next- generation laser sensors such as rangefinders, target designators and active illuminated imagers.

Systems Approach to the Development and Application of Technical Metrics to Systems Engineering Projects

Thales UK employs around 3,000 engineers, over half of which are systems engineers, delivering solutions from transport systems and secure transactions to integrated communications, naval sensors, and air defense systems. The Systems Engineering (SE) function within Thales UK seeks to minimize the impact of, or eliminate problematic SE projects. Here, problematic projects are defined as ones where the SE group on a project was expected to deliver certain characteristics against cost/time constraints arising from the problem context, however the project did not, or will not meet expectations by a significant margin. A traditional view is that the impact to the Company of problematic projects can be minimized by early detection and subsequent intervention by SE leadership. As such, Thales UK seeks to implement an approach that will alert SE staff and leadership to the presence or development of problematic projects, such that appropriate interventions can be made.Literature regarding SE technical metrics explores the development, and less frequently, the use of metrics to provide information to project teams to support judgments about current versus desirable positions. No literature has been identified that describes how SE technical metrics could be used en-masse to provide insight in to the performance of a diverse portfolio of SE projects. Thales UK has mandated the collection of a set of SE technical metrics on all SE projects, and understands that the reported data requires interpretation and relation to context. The context of each project is different and dynamic. This presents a challenge when attempting to use this data to draw conclusions regarding the health of all projects across an enterprise, and the health of the operation of an entire engineering function.This paper describes a quasi-experiment with SE leaders and project technical metrics from a range of domains within Thales UK to test whether expert judgment can determine if a project is problematic or not from metric data alone. A separate research activity is then presented which moves toward a theory of how a metrics approach could be structured for use across a diverse range of SE projects to detect characteristics of problematic projects.

A New Simulation Architecture for Communication Network Systems with Application to HF Radio

 Abstract—This paper describes a simulation architecture developed to address the need in the defence and aerospace industry for a rapid prototyping capability to test new and existing network protocols and systems where analytical methods no longer suffice. In particular, the simulator introduced here allows study of High Frequency (HF) radio networks and other unorthodox systems that cannot be easily modelled using existing communications network simulators. This paper describes the architecture and gives an example use case - modelling an HF System using the 2G Automatic Link Establishment (ALE) linking protocol under a variety of conditions; exploring the effects of changing the number of nodes in the network, and of altering the input data rate to the system. The network performance was analysed under a wide range of combinations of conditions, and it was found that increasing the number of nodes in these networks causes specific latency increases and an overall throughput decrease, both in the unidirectional and bidirectional case, although it is better tolerated in the unidirectional case. Increasing the input data rate causes an overall throughput increase up to a threshold point, after which it saturates and then decreases as data remains unsent, due to the physical limits of the system (including networking overhead) being surpassed. This simulator, known as CommNetSim has been developed for use in evaluating the technical capabilities of, and business cases for, real-world applications to be developed by Thales UK. Index Terms—Communication networks, discrete event simulation, high frequency radio, modelling, simulation.

1.2.3 Designing a Knowledge Management System (KMS) for a complex engineering environment

AbstractThis paper forms a part of the Engineering Doctorate (EngD) project sponsored by EPSRC and Thales UK. The aim of this project is to design a knowledge management system (KMS) to be applied in a complex engineering environment in the military electronics domain, by identifying and addressing issues in the sponsor organisation, Thales UK. This paper discusses the systems engineering approach taken during the requirement analysis phase and describes the key issues emerging which will impact on the design of the KMS. After giving a brief introduction of the project and methodology used in the project, the paper presents a creation of a theoretical baseline built to understand the questions involved in creating KMS (section 3), an investigation carried out in the company environment to explore existing KM issues (Section 4 and 5), and a dual case study approach undertaken to further investigate KM (section 6). The paper is concluded by summarising the key achievements of the research and outlining the approach for future steps for formal requirement generation.

RF Engines sign further contract with Thales UK

RF Engines sign further contract with Thales UK

QinetiQ and Thales UK awarded £1.7m “first phase” of decision support contract

QinetiQ and Thales UK awarded £1.7m “first phase” of decision support contract

Dimensional expansion for thermal imaging

The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) has awarded an £8.45 million contract for development of thermal imaging technology based on cadmium mercury telluride (CMT) detectors. Managing the development contract is SELEX Sensors and Airborne Systems (S&AS), while QinetiQ and Thales UK are also part of the team.