retirement
fire fighting
national power
insurance fraud

The NHS Pensions Agency is an agency of the Department of Health with responsibility for handling all of the National Health Service pension requirements. To help in this, they have a suite of six major Prolog/Flex systems and several smaller systems which are used by up to 350 networked staff every day.

This makes them one of the largest expert systems and it has been in use for perhaps the longest of any expert system. Since their inception in 1989, Charms and related systems have handled over 10 million benefit award, estimate and associated calculations.

The systems handle the Agency's pension awards, transfers and added benefit purchase calculations for the members of the NHS Pension Scheme (with a few exceptions). They provide estimates and process early retirements, redundancies and transfers into and out of the scheme. There have been changes to the legislation since its inception in 1948, with very little superceded and almost all added to existing legislation. This emphasises the complexity and importance of cut off dates and temporal relations in the calculations.

Though the original systems were delivered in MS-DOS on 286 PCs, the systems have matured and evolved and now Windows GUI and integration with various desktop and back office standard packages.

The new suite of Windows based systems were delivered before January 2000. As the systems are legislation based, there is a continual need for updating and enhancing their functionality. This process has, and is expected to continue as long as the systems are in use. IBiS is contracted to maintain, upgrade and enhance these systems developed in LPA WinProlog under Windows NT.

The role of IBiS has evolved from that of design and development to training and technical support and most recently maintenance. LPA has assisted in various times in helping make the various leaps and adjustments imposed by a constantly changing hardware and software environment.



The REMS Project will develop counter-measures to internal theft and fraud for retailers. It will cover all forms of retailing transactions, including EPOS and e-commerce. Its ultimate objective is to develop a solution where state-of-the-art software and other techniques can transform large amounts of computer and other data into clear management information.
The FRISC Project will develop state-of-the art counter-measures to combat fraudulent insurance claims which cost £650 million each year. Lancaster University's Dept's of Psychology and Computing will identify and document skills, expertise, data and problem-solving deployed by AXA in its' proven fraud detection role. Liaison with the insurance industry will enable the software developers at LPA and IBiS to implement the findings using leading edge technology in practical user-driven applications.


FORFAIT sets out to develop and demonstrate a Decision Support System (DSS) to assist planners, regulators and industry in optimising the management of forest fire risks, on a holistic, integrated and traceable basis. It will aid in implementing measures that eliminate or mitigate harm to humans, the environment and business, using a cost benefit approach where appropriate and depending on local regulatory requirements.

FORFAIT will uniquely combine generic and time varying site-specific information (via electronic links from field and satellite data sources), state-of-the-art predictive models, and expert knowledge. Recognising that in general there are many different decisions that could be made in any given situation the system will use fuzzy logic to suggest the most appropriate course of action and a probabilistic framework to take account of uncertainty in the parameters.

Large national power supplier (PLC)
These systems include :
1. Graphic display of the continuous power supply to a client. This was disrupted by randomly generated breaks ot the supply and the effects of acceptance rules upon contractual obligations were reported to the users.
2. Throughout years, contracts had been composed using different modes of reference structures to identify specific clauses for inclusion in them. The system automated the standardisation of cross-references in existing legislative contracts using Definite Clause Grammar (ensuring that only specific notations were allowed and identifying any transgressions from the norm).

One of the largest International Accountancy Groups
Maintenance and enhancement of auditing systems which auditors took with them on laptops when visiting clients to produce immediate reports on National Insurance, PAYE and VAT compliance.

Other Clients
Training Provisions : BAeSEMA, British Gas, Chessington Computer Centre, ICL, itsa, Portsmouth University, RAF, RHM, Stafford University.

Consultancy :
H&S Executive - carcinagenicity identification.
Home Office - application of imigration rules to students.
itsa - (previously Social Security IT section) NHS pensions.