Project: MathematicalModelling of Resilient Cold Supply Chain
Supervisors: Marcus Tindall & Zuowei Wang
Project Description:
Supply chains are critical national assets. They have naturally evolved in time, but recent international events have put many under pressure in their ability to seamlessly bring products to our doors. There is now considerable effort focused on ensuring our supply chains are resilient to short, medium and longer term events, in which weather and climate play a dominant role.
At the same time the application of complex systems mathematical modelling approaches is a new and growing area in supply chain research. This project will enable you to work closely with a range of government and industrial partners across cold supply chains, to understand how resilient current refrigerated supply chains are to short, medium and longer term shock events as a result of a changing climate. Simultaneously you will work on ensuring chains are designed to ensure refrigeration energy expenditure, which adversely affects the climate, is minimised. Results will inform both industry approaches to cold supply chain management as well as sector (e.g. food) and national government policy.
You will join a vibrant group of mathematical and physical researchers on this project which excitingly brings together network theory (with underlying themes of topology and model parameterisation) energy integrals, sensitivity analysis and optimisation theory. Formulated using the theory of nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) models will be investigated both analytically and numerically, utilising asymptotic perturbation theory, numerical quadrature and optimisation approaches.
