Conference: March 5-7, 2018

Workshops: March 8-9, 2018

Speaker:
Alex Harvey
Head of Robotics and Autonomous Systems @Ocado

After studying Mechanical Engineering followed by Computer Science at university in Edinburgh, Alex started his career as a software engineer and vibration analyst in the aerospace industry. He worked for HGL Dynamics and was subcontracted into Rolls Royce as a vibration expert. Alex led the redevelopment of the entire HGL analysis suite of applications as well as negotiating, specifying and managing the delivery of a condition monitoring and proactive maintenance system that operates on all turbine-powered Royal Navy surface ships. After joining Ocado in 2010, Alex worked as project manager delivering a second generation, highly efficient goods-to-person picking system that has been deployed in the company's Hatfield and Dordon fulfilment centres. Alex is now head of robotics and autonomous systems department, where his wide-ranging responsibilities include the technology development of Ocado’s proprietary warehousing automation and overseeing teams of researchers in robotics, 3D vision, simulation and 3D visualisation. In his spare time he likes to hike up Munroe’s in Scotland and spend as much time outdoors with his family.

Talk : Logistics as a Service: Building the Ocado Smart Platform

Track : Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Location : Fleming, 3rd flr.
Day of week : Tuesday
Duration : 11:50am - 12:40pm

Selling groceries online at a profit is considered by many to be the Holy Grail of retail. The Ocado Smart Platform is the result of 15 years of learning through the application of technology to this domain, from control protocols for an army of 1000 warehouse robots, through optimising delivery routes as customers shop and using machine learning to predict what products customers might want. In this presentation, we will show how the architecture of this cloud-native platform has allowed Ocado to fulfill an order of 50 grocery items in less than five minutes. We will also present how Ocado Technology has built a scalable, AWS-based microservices architecture and Google Cloud-powered data analytics combined with a swarm robotics grid controlled by an intelligent air traffic system running on private cloud that is unlike anything currently available on the market. 

Other talks from track Architectures You've Always Wondered About

Actors or Not: Async Event Architectures
Sr Software Engineer @Demonware building Activision's Call of Duty
Yaroslav Tkachenko
Logistics as a Service: Building the Ocado Smart Platform
Head of Software Architecture @Ocado
Paul Sweetman
Lambda Architectures: a Snapshot, a Stream, & a Bunch of Deltas
SVP Engineering @HBC, Gilt & Committer Apache Karaf
Adrian Trenaman
Microservices: API Re-platforming @Expedia
VP/CTO, Expedia Affiliate Network
Mariano Albera
Inside a Self-Driving Uber
Sr. Staff Engineer @UberATG
Matt Ranney

Last Year's Tracks

Monday, 5 March

Tuesday, 6 March

Wednesday, 7 March

This Year's Schedule

Learn trends from innovator and early adopter companies that you can bring home to your team

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