720777Game changing software for Analytical Instruments: Real impact in a $100bn pa market.ClosedGRD Development of PrototypeInnovate UKAnalytical laboratories (Labs) test samples to determine what is in them. A wide range of sophisticated Intelligent Instruments do this work. It is ~ $100bn pa global market. Instruments (typical cost £30k-100k) are controlled by proprietary software running on attached, dedicated PCs. There are millions of such systems globally. They produce numerical results (e.g. Zinc concentration is 4.6). Usually automated, each generates hundreds/thousands of results/day. Depending on what is being measured, they use different techniques (e.g. spectroscopy) by which the market is segmented. Instrument software is effective at generating results, but it is not optimized for maximum operational efficiency in the Lab environment. Through leading edge technical innovation, critical use of what are known as software agents (collections of autonomous software systems that collaborate to perform some task), 30 years of global domain expertise and a novel approach, we will maximize instrument efficiency. This proposal is for the creation of radically designed, prototype software, Instrument PC Essentials (IPCE), that will: • Get a new instrument into service faster with higher ongoing availability and throughput • Produce results at dramatically lower costs, with better quality and get them to the Lab’s customers quicker The aim is for Vendors to ship IPCE preinstalled on instrument PCs. So the software must: • Be of low enough cost to effect minimally the end user instrument price • Work “straight out of the box” • Be so compelling in its benefits to Lab users, that it shifts the competitive balance towards instruments that use it Savings from using IPCE are such that for most it would: • pay for itself AND the instrument in its lifetime • provide highly significant quality, speed and usability benefits IPCE technology will shift the competitive landscape for Vendors through providing huge advantages to their users. It will be disruptive in a $100bn p.a. marketplace.