University of Portsmouth Higher Education Corporation and Rethink Productivity Consulting Limited KTP 24_25 R4

A shop floor camera tracks how customers move through aisles, then an AI system adjusts staffing levels and checkout openings in real time to match the flow of people. Retail, hospitality, and manufacturing businesses routinely struggle to match staff and resources to fluctuating customer demand. Overstaffing wastes money; understaffing loses sales and frustrates customers. Current capacity management often relies on historical averages or manual guesswork, which cannot respond to sudden changes such as a lunchtime rush or a delivery delay. This project applies AI to live movement data—captured from existing security or occupancy cameras—so that a system can predict and respond to demand as it happens. The AI analyses patterns of footfall, queue length, and dwell time without storing identifiable images, keeping the system compliant with UK data protection law. If the approach works, a café could open a second till just before the lunch queue forms, or a factory could redirect workers to a bottleneck station minutes before it slows production. The same logic could extend to managing hospital waiting areas, airport security lanes, or warehouse packing lines—anywhere people or goods move unpredictably. The project is a commercial partnership, not fundamental science, and its immediate goal is a deployable product for the three target sectors.