Software suite for brewery management system

The Craft brewery sector consists of approximately 1,350 Craft brewery SMEs in the UK and an estimated 15,000 across the EU. Missing the optimum time window for Craft beer consumption is costly as is the under utilisation of Casks. Halving wasted product and increasing Cask utilisation by as little as 2% would save around £18.75M across the sector in the UK and over £200M in Europe.

Building on recent exciting R&D innovations by Saker Solutions, Brunel University London and Hobsons Brewery, the CraftBrew Whole Brewery Management System project aimed to develop a sophisticated, affordable, comprehensive software suite to increase the efficient use of resources, reduce waste and increase productivity of the Craft brewery supply chain. CraftBrew will use a novel combination of detailed process simulations that can comprehensively represent critical detail in the brewery supply chain and tightly coupled quality control and tracking.

Partners

Saker Solutions and Hobsons Brewery

Publications

• Anagnostou, A., Taylor, S.J.E., Bell, D., Kite, S. and Pattison, G. (2018) “CraftBrew: Towards a Low-Cost Brewery Management System with Cloud-Based Simulation and Delivery Route Optimization.” In Proceedings of the Operational Research Society 9th Simulation Workshop (SW18), Case Study, Stratford, Worcestershire, England, March 19-21, 2018.
• Kite, S., Pattison, G., Anagnostou, A., Bell, D. and Taylor, S.J.E. (2017) “CraftBrew: Experiences of Developing a Low-Cost Brewery Management System with Cloud-Based Simulation.” In Proceedings of the 2017 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC17), Edited by W. K. V. Chan, A. D'Ambrogio, G. Zacharewicz, N. Mustafee, G. Wainer, and E. Page, Las Vegas, NV, December 3-6.

Meet the Principal Investigator(s) for the project

Professor Simon Taylor - imon J E Taylor is a Professor of Computer Science specialising in Modelling & Simulation and Digital Infrastructures.  He has made many contributions to manufacturing, health care and international development.  He has worked with international consortia (in particular UNICT, WACREN and the UBUNTUNET ALLIANCE) to contribute to the development of National Research and Education Networks in Africa that has impacted over 3 million students and 300 universities. He has also worked with international consortia (in particular Saker Solutions, the University of Westminster, SZTAKI and CloudSME UG) to develop high performance simulation systems that are being used by over 30 European SMEs and large-scale enterprises such as the Ford Motor Company and Sellafield PLC.  He continues to work closely with industry - his work has led to over £30M of savings and new products in industry.  He also contributes to the development of Open Science principles and practice for Africa and for Modelling & Simulation as a field.   He has led modules in distributed computing in the Department of Computer Science for many years with high module evaluations scores and is an enthusiastic teacher.  He has also led the development of several postgraduate degrees.  He has supervised over 20 doctoral students, has examined more than 25 doctoral students from across the world and has managed over 15 research fellows. Professor Taylor co-founded and is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Simulation and the UK Operational Research Society Simulation Workshop Series.  He chaired ACM SIGSIM between 2005-2008 and since then has been an active member of the ACM SIGSIM Steering Committee. He is also the General Chair for the 2025 Winter Simulation Conference. He has chaired international standardisation groups under the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization and has conducted several organisational review panels (e.g., DSTL) and simulation audits. He is currently the executive chair for the annual Simulation Exploration Experience (https://www.exploresim.com/) and a member of the Computer Simulation Archive steering committee (https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/computer-simulation/).  He has also chaired several conferences and is the General Chair for the IEEE/ACM 2025 Winter Simulation Conference. Interested in the history of computer simulation?  Visit the Computer Simulation Archive hosted by NCSU and hear talks from some of the pioneers in computer simulation.

Related Research Group(s)

Modelling and Simulation - Investigating how modelling and simulation can be supported by research into high-performance computing, e-infrastructures, cyberinfrastructures, cloud computing and web-based simulation.

Project last modified 02/10/2023