Terranova and Imperial College London: a partnership focused on Artificial Intelligence

The partnership

Synergies between ourselves and academic institutions play a key role our constant quest for innovation. One example is our recent partnership with Imperial College London, which, founded in 1907 in London, is ranked as the sixth best university in the world, according to the QS World University Rankings 2024, and specializes in science, engineering, medicine and business administration. This institution boasts 14 Nobel Prizes, 3 Fields Medals and 74 Royal Society Fellows to date.

Collaborations such as this one aim to bridge the gap between theory and practice, and try to find innovative solutions that can positively affect industry and society as a whole. A key goal of this partnership is to promote joint research on topics that are relevant to both realities.

Jennifer Leigh's thesis project

The algorithms behind Artificial Intelligence or optimization solutions are often very complex, as a result the logic is difficult for the end user to understand, thus being an obstacle in justifying the choices made in terms of investment in business solutions.

For this reason, explainability techniques have been introduced for different disciplines, from AI to optimization. These techniques are aimed at describing these processes or otherwise providing more precise information about the process that leads to the output, the final result.

Terranova has recently developed an optimizer for field activities, the so-called Field Service Management, which goes to schedule operators' interventions optimally with respect to some parameters (such as distance traveled, priority or time spent). All this is done by taking into consideration some constraints such as appointments, working hours of the operators, skills required for solving this task and more.

The goal of the project in collaboration with Imperial College London was to try to make the solutions as transparent as possible, without reducing performance.

Together we worked on a tool that goes to explain the various steps that lead from a proposed schedule to an optimal schedule, showing how moving various tasks from one operator to another improves the performance of the solution while still meeting the constraints of the problem.

The introduction of AI processes into Terranova's products

Our research in AI is established and ongoing. The solution designed through this partnership is the first step in optimization that will open the door to similar tools on all our applications containing optimization algorithms.

Lucio Machetti, R&D Manager Terranova