Postgraduate research opportunities Resilient Supply Chains in Disaster Management

Existing methods of supply chain optimization for complex multi-echelon operations are often computationally expensive, and this problem is further complicated when uncertainties are involved, which propagate upstream or downstream in such a multi-echelon system. This becomes a particular challenge during emergency situations, which involves in finding an efficient transition to accommodate the new requirements of an emergency situation that can be either local (e.g., floods, forest fires) or global (e.g., pandemics) and can be sudden (e.g., earthquakes) or predictable within a short time frame (e.g., pandemic, hurricanes).

Supply chain emergency response management has focussed on individual dimensions such as agility, risk/knowledge management, operational planning (e.g., logistics, facility location, or inventory management), humanitarian issues, and multi-level integration. There is need to develop theory and mathematical models that perceives this as a multifaceted and integrated problem, as well as computational tools that maximize existing data analytics and algorithmic capabilities in the current data-driven world.

The project aims to attempt to address several research questions, such as:

1. Do cooperative strategies offer superior benefits in post-disaster supply chain planning?
2. What is the best recovery time that one can meaningfully accomplish in the event of a disaster?
3. How can we incorporate difficult decisions such as choosing which customers/products to serve?

We are interested in mathematically modelling these problems and designing customised algorithms and data analytics tools and perform extensive computational testing.

Further information

Students will be funded to attend advanced Operational Research training courses, and provided opportunities to attend workshops and conferences to present their work.