Mike Pegman - Resume

Vine Solutions Ltd December 95 to date Director and Consultant

Headway Systems Ltd February 1990 to December 95 Director
International Paint Plc September 1985 to February 1990 Applications Analyst
Courtaulds plc Scholarship Student, Cambridge University, Computer Science (BA Hons, MA)

Commitment to achieving objectives,
at the highest quality and with personal integrity,
characterises my approach to client requirements.

I offer proven commercial, communication and technical skills at the leading edge of the application of IT.

Home

Vine Solutions Ltd

Vine Solutions Ltd is an Partner Company.

Mike Pegman is Director of Vine Solutions Ltd, a software development, training and consultancy company specialising in resource allocation, planning and scheduling and decision support solutions.

Vine Solutions is building on Mike’s leading role in the development of constraint solving applications in the UK. It employs his extensive development experience and business awareness to facilitate leading-edge solutions for clients. Vine Solutions works with clients’ in-house IT personnel or business unit staff to develop specifications, to design appropriate models and user interfaces, or to code applications.

Vine Solutions clients include Logica, Severn Trent Systems, RTZ Technical Services, PA Consulting Group, Cap Gemini, the Sema Group, and Science Systems as well as ILOG, the leading constraint and object tool vendor, for which Mike delivers technical training and consultancy, covering ILOG Solver, Scheduler, Planner, Dispatcher, Rules and Views.

Mike has experience of a wide range of application areas including:

mineral open-pit mine planning and scheduling for RTZ
automotive manufacturing - production scheduling
airspace capacity planning for civil aviation
aircraft stand planning for British Airways
aircraft allocation and maintenance planning
rostering complex training courses
rostering operational staff in the civil aviation sector
aircraft ground movement planning for Heathrow airport
real time plant simulation and monitoring (using discrete simulation techniques and Muse, a rule based system, parallel C and Strand on Transputers)
production planning and scheduling (both conventional MRPII and advanced schedulers employing ILOG tools)
satellite mission scheduling
engineer field service scheduling for utility sector
materials management - stock matching and metals production sequencing
planning and scheduling of manufacturing (including chemicals, food stuffs, assembly and metals)
various distribution applications.

There is an overview sheet giving more detail and links.

Vine Solutions also facilitates the ILOG Solver Schedule User Group.

Some Publications

Short Term Scheduling for Metal Manufacture (see )
M Pegman Proc Third Int’l ILOG Solver and Schedule Users’ Conference, July 1997
and Proc Practical Applications of Constraint Technology ’98

Mine Planning and Scheduling at RTZ Technical Services, Mike Pegman, Vine Solutions Ltd ,
N Forward, B King, D Teal, RTZ Technical Services Ltd,
Best Technical Paper, Proc Second Int’l ILOG Solver and Schedule Users’ Conference, July 1996

Tail Allocation,
Gomberg G (Logica UK), Proc Fourth Int’l ILOG Solver and Schedule Users’ Conference, Oct 1998

Practical Scheduling and Resource Allocation Applications at Courtaulds Coatings and British Airways,
Proc Practical Applications of Constraint Technology ‘96,
M Pegman, Vine Solutions Ltd, and J Heslop, Headway Systems Ltd, Dec 1995,

Applications and experience in the Civil Aviation sector,
M Pegman and J Heslop, 1995,
in Proc First Int’l ILOG Solver and Schedule Users’ Conference, July 1995.

Constraint Based Scheduling for the Process Industries, M Pegman, Dec 1995,
I Chem E publication ISBN 0 906636 29 9

Mike Pegman has over ten years experience in IT & has been responsible for all aspects of the whole of the project cycle: tools and methods; analysis and design, prototyping; code development and system delivery; quality and customer satisfaction. He has been working with the key decision support technologies since 1985 - GUIs, object oriented development, production rule systems and constraint solving.

Mike has extensive experience of C, C++ and object-oriented programming and GUI development, delivering applications which include databases (SQL and VB / Access / Paradox) on local area networks. He also has a strong background in Prolog and Lisp, and related AI technologies including planning, scheduling, knowledge based systems. All recent projects have used constraint solving for scheduling and planning applications incorporating ILOG Solver, Schedule and Views.

Headway Systems Limited

Mike Pegman joined Headway Systems in 1990 and has played a pivotal part in its business, working in both technical and project management roles. He was appointed a director in 1992. As projects dictated, he has worked with sole responsibility and as leader of a development team. He has been responsible for design, development and delivery of a wide range of projects, involving high levels of technical, communication and commercial skills, and extensive responsibility for clients.

Mike played a key role in development projects, acting as the primary contact for the customer and as team manager in several, but in all has held system design and coding responsibilities. Overviews of some of the projects follow.

A bespoke production planning and scheduling system has been developed for a process manufacturer - employing constraint based schedule generation in a GUI environment, delivering a novel flexible dynamic rescheduler under a user-friendly interface. (OOD, ILOG Solver Schedule & Views, C++ & GUI.)
M Pegman, Dec 1995, Constraint Based Scheduling for the Process Industries, I Chem E publication ISBN 0 906636 29 9
M Pegman, 1995, Constraint Based Process Manufacturing Scheduling, A White Paper, Headway Systems Ltd 1995.
Mike led the design team for a stand planning application for British Airways. This system plans gate assignments for a schedule of aircraft arrival and departures to model stands and gates at London’ s Heathrow.
M Pegman and J Heslop, 1995, Applications and experience in the Civil Aviation sector,
in Proc First Int’l ILOG Solver and Schedule Users’ Conference, 10,11 July 1995, Abbaye des Vaux de Cernay, France.
also in: J Heslop, Y Alaoui, 1995, Stand Planning: An Airline Application of Constraint Programming
in Aviation, Transport and Travel Info Systems (ATTIS) 95, 30,31 May 95, Vienna.
Mike designed and developed a tool for analysing the complexity of airspace scenarios for the UK Civil Aviation Authority. The software analyses the outputs of a fast time simulation model of air traffic assessing the air traffic control operations required to manage the movements.
Design and implementation of an aircraft ground movement modelling system incorporating planning and scheduling techniques to model aircraft movements for the world's busiest international airport -BAA plc / Heathrow Airport. Constraint based programming was employed to represent the demand for resources over time and to search for viable solutions to the movement scheduling problem. The project delivered results in a tight two month timescale and to provide support for a management decision making process. (ILOG Schedule, ILOG Solver, C++, Object-oriented design and development, technology transfer to client.)
M Pegman, 1994, ILOG Schedule Application - Aircraft Ground Movement Planning, ILOG Publication 1994
A system for Price Waterhouse's World Technology Based Training Unit to assist in the development of interactive training materials was designed and developed. It allows the interactive development and testing of man-machine dialogues by training material development staff (cf programmers). (Prolog prototype, reimplemented in C)
M Pegman and M Iliff, 1991, Improving Interface Effectiveness - Developing Interactive Training at Price Waterhouse, Usability Now!, DTI Issue 6 Winter 91/92
From Feb 90 to Sept 91 Mike undertook technical management (system design, staff supervision and project planning) of a £120000 research project, funded by Employment Department, and undertaken at Durham University. The project explored the use of Transputer based simulation of complex electro-mechanical equipment, knowledge based systems and hypertext, in a MS Windows environment, as training resources for maintenance engineers. (4 staff, C SDK Windows, DDE, Guide hypertext, 3L Parallel C, Strand - parallel logic language, INMOS Transputer arrays.)
M Pegman, A J Slade, 1991, Early Progress with a parallel logic language on transputer hardware for the simulation of mechanical machinery, in Applied Simulation and System Dynamics, Ed AO Moscardini and EJ Fletcher 1991.

International Paint plc

International Paint is part of the Courtaulds group. Mike was briefed to introduce Knowledge Based Systems technology into the technical division of the group. Activities ranged from management awareness activities ‘IT for competitive advantage’, including presentations to board members, through to the management of projects and the development of applications.

Work during this period included: Alvey Programme (project managed Courtaulds membership of the DAPES awareness club); Membership of Expert Systems International's Prometheus Prolog Toolkit development group of companies, which Mike chaired, and research projects into intelligent front ends to text databases.

Practical KBS projects included:

A Sales Support Expert System for a European launch of a new product range, was developed in Prolog under for the PC
Published in DTI Warren Springs Lab, Personal Computers in Industrial Control, 1989
Project management of a pilot expert system for formulated Product Development, in association with Logica Cambridge. The project used PFES (Product Formulation Expert System) inclination shell tool and extensive knowledge engineering with groups of chemists.
Novel control techniques for real time monitoring and diagnosis of simulated plant (Heriot-Watt University C, MUSE).

During the latter part of his time with Courtaulds, from late 87 to 89, within the European IT function (IBM mainframe environment) Mike worked in a business analysis and IT development role responsible for the implementation of PC components of systems to support manufacturing and quality management, as well as undertaking analyses of business processes for operating units and reviews of technology strategy.

Cambridge University

Whilst at Cambridge University, reading Computer Science (Hons 2:1) where he was sponsored by Courtaulds, and reflecting interest in computational linguistics, Mike developed a parser for English under the supervision of the Computer Laboratory's Natural Language Group. The system was written in Lisp and implemented a chart parser for Gazdar and Pullum’s Generalised Phrase Structured Grammar (GPSG ID/LP 1982). The parser used a lexicon of words augmented with information which were matched by unification to a directed acyclic graph whose syntactic constitution was controlled by the chart parser applying GPSG grammar rules.

The Joint Consultancy in Patterns and Systems Ltd

During a five month period (spring & summer 1984) managing another software developer Mike designed, developed and implemented a process optimisation tool for the two dimensional laminate cutting industry (under contract to The Joint Consultancy in Patterns and Systems Ltd). The system minimised waste within the constraints of the manufacturing process, and raw material and work in progress policies. Although implemented in Pascal, the system took a heuristic approach to the resolution of constraints which were represented in an explicit form. This project was a specialised, but commercially viable implementation of the general 2D cutting problem. It was installed at the customer's site in Luxemburg in the summer of 84.

Top of page Home