Nightingale HQ Joins Forces With King’s College London
Nightingale HQ is excited to announce a new strategic collaboration with King’s College London. This partnership brings together the expertise of Dr. Amanda Coles, a leading researcher in Artificial Intelligence Planning, and her faculty team to the metals industry through the application of advanced AI planning techniques.
The collaboration leverages King’s cutting-edge research in General Explainable AI Planning and Nightingale HQ’s industrial expertise in optimisation to tackle some of the most pressing challenges facing the steel sector. Together, the teams will focus on reducing material scrap, optimising processes, and lowering carbon emissions, all critical steps toward making steel production more sustainable and cost-efficient.
“We are thrilled to partner with King’s College London to bring innovative AI solutions to the steel sector,” said Ruth Kearney, CEO of Nightingale HQ. “This collaboration will not only enhance our production planning capabilities but also contribute directly to our mission of making steel production greener and more sustainable.”
The agreement provides a framework for joint research and development activities, including impact studies and prototyping with AI planning techniques within Nightingale HQ’s production environment. Key focus areas include optimising long products and cutting operations, while also developing contrastive explanations for cutting stock problems in order to understand why certain AI-driven decisions are made.
Dr. Amanda Coles added;
“Working with Nightingale HQ gives us an exciting opportunity to apply our research to real-world industrial challenges. By combining academic innovation with practical deployment, we can demonstrate how explainable AI planning can transform steel production, reducing waste and supporting the industry’s transition to a more sustainable future.”
This partnership underscores Nightingale HQ’s commitment to driving digital transformation across the metals sector and King’s College London’s role at the forefront of applied AI research. Together, they aim to set a new benchmark for efficiency and sustainability in steel making.
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For more information on collaborations, please contact
Ruth Kearney, CEO, Nightingale HQ at ruth@nightingalehq.ai
The research agenda
The partnership between Nightingale HQ and King’s College London focuses on one of the most important technical challenges in manufacturing AI: planning and optimisation under real-world constraints. Dr Amanda Coles brings world-class expertise in AI planning — specifically in the branch of planning research concerned with explainable, temporally-aware plans that can handle the kind of complex scheduling constraints that manufacturing environments present.
For steel fabrication, these constraints are significant: material availability, machine capacity, crew scheduling, delivery deadlines, and the precedence relationships between different processing steps all need to be considered simultaneously. The result of a good plan is not just an optimised schedule — it is a schedule that production teams can understand, trust, and execute with confidence.
Why explainability matters in manufacturing AI
The adoption of AI in manufacturing is frequently held back by a trust gap: production managers and planners are understandably reluctant to follow the recommendations of a system they cannot interrogate. If a cutting plan or production schedule cannot be explained — if the system cannot show its working — then the human expert’s instinct is to override it.
Explainable AI planning, which is Dr Coles’ area of expertise, directly addresses this problem. The goal is not just to generate optimal plans, but to generate plans that can be explained to the people who need to execute them. This is a research challenge that is simultaneously technically demanding and practically important — and it is the reason that the partnership with King’s College London is strategically significant for GoSmarter.
The DPGSM project context
The research partnership sits within the broader context of the DPGSM project — Re-imagining Design and Planning for Greener Reinforcement Steel Manufacturing — which brings together Nightingale HQ, Midland Steel, KUKA Robotics Ireland, OCSC Engineers, Bastal Steel Norway, and VTT Research and Innovation Institute Finland. The academic partnership with King’s College London provides the research rigour that complements the practical manufacturing expertise of the consortium’s industry partners.