Edinburgh-based mathematics research company ThinkTank Maths (TTM) has appointed Aberdeen businessman and ITF chairman Max Rowe in an advisory capacity.
The company is focused on creative mathematical research to expand the boundaries of scientific understanding and deliver practical results that transform their clients’ business models and technologies.
ThinkTank has tackled issues as diverse as, for example, spacecraft testing, cash machine refilling and animal breeding.
The firm says these are all domains where established practices and huge volumes of data have been obstacles to innovation, but which mathematics has revolutionised: similar needs for such breakthroughs are now emerging in the oil and gas sector.
Obviously, maths already underpins most oil and gas activities, so what does TTM offer that is different?
According to Rowe, TTM is “an exceptionally talented team” of mathematicians recruited from top international universities.
In the oil and gas industry engineering solutions may be underpinned by maths that is 50 or 100 years old.
“Challenging the approximations and assumptions that have been made, or using a completely different domain of mathematics, has the potential to transform how we tackle the increasingly complex issues that our industry is facing,” says Rowe.
“This has relevance not only within the realm of engineering but within every aspect of our industry.
“Maths can be used to describe, and help us understand, every aspect of the world around us. However, just as there are many ways in which something can be described verbally, there are different ways of describing things mathematically.
The different descriptions give varying levels of detail or highlight different aspects of the subject.
“For example, the terms ‘container’, ‘glass’ and ‘wine glass’, can all be used to describe the same object; using a different mathematical approach to describe a problem – effectively a more precise mathematical language, can help us to understand the issues more clearly and open up new solutions.”
As an example, TTM suggests that novel mathematical representations of complex data can highlight specific features – the presence of interesting patterns or the emergence of new dynamical interactions.
In the oil and gas context, the company is exploring this approach in reservoir modelling, history matching and seismic data interpretation, using innovative mathematics to efficiently capture the variability of rock formations and to reduce both computational effort and uncertainty.
TTM’s work on a retail bank’s cash machine refilling operation is a good illustration of the transformational impact maths can have on an everyday industry process. For banks, guaranteeing reliable ATM cash supply is a massive operational challenge. Operators have to monitor thousands of machines and forecast busy periods, and even the weather, to manage the refill schedule for every machine individually.
TTM developed a new refill scheduling algorithm that a client said led to savings of 21% – several million pounds per annum.
In another example, relating to animal breeding, studying the mathematical features of genetic information allowed TTM to reduce a critical breeding calculation that would have required millions of years, to a couple of hours on a normal desktop computer.
Rowe: “What I find fascinating about these two seemingly unrelated examples is that in mathematical terms, they turned out to be strikingly similar, and this further illustrates the way in which advanced mathematics can help us understand the fundamental nature of industry problems.
“ThinkTank Maths have already worked in a close relationship with some major operating companies, but in terms of the oil and gas industry as a whole, I believe they have only just scratched the surface of what is possible.”
More examples of TTM’s work can be found at
http://thinktankmaths.com