Professor Robert Harrison
| WMG Accelerator
Robert Harrison is Professor of Automation Systems and head of the Digital Technologies Directorate at WMG, University of Warwick. He focuses on R&D related to manufacturing digitalisation, Industry 4.0, and the Internet of Things, and how these new paradigms impact on and support the lifecycle of automation in industry today and in the future. His work includes the creation of digital twins, virtual engineering tools, and manufacturing analytics and optimisation.
His expertise is underpinned by a lifetime’s experience of working in systems integration and engineering tools and methods for automation systems realisation in close collaboration with industry. He has conducted collaborative research programmes with a wide range of companies and has more than 200 peer-reviewed publications and a wide network of academic collaborators, nationally and internationally. Previously a founding member of the MSI (Manufacturing Systems Integration) Group at Loughborough University, a Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore, Ford Motor Company, and Schneider Electric, and recipient of a Royal Academy of Engineering Global Research Award in the field of Modular Reconfigurable Manufacturing Automation. Robert has also played a major role in the UK and Europe in research related to the realisation of service-oriented distributed systems for embedded devices and the integration of business systems with SoA-based automation systems, with a particular focus of expertise on the creation of lifecycle engineering tools and related data models.