News

CSAM completes the ULTIMATE project

CSAM Duputy Director Professor Nav Mustafee has recently completed the ULTIMATE project (indUstry water-utiLiTy symbIosis for a sMarter wATer society) bringing a successful four-year international collaboration to an end.

ULTIMATE, stared from June 2020, was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (GA 869318) as part of the circular economy call CE-SC5-04-2019. The consortium was coordinated by Dutch water cycle research institute, KWR, and supported by 26 partners from 11 countries, including companies, industrial stakeholders, specialised SMEs, applied research institutes, technology platforms, cities, and regional authorities.

ULTIMATE aimed to create economic value and increase sustainability by valorising resources within the water cycle. The key achievements in ULTIMATE including better understanding of reusable resource in industrial wastewater, development ofa methodology to facilitate the industrial symbiosis for recycling and sharing the resources among business oriented industrial ecosystem. The Centre for Water Systems (CWS) and the Centre for Simulation, Analytics and Modelling (CSAM) at the Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy (ESE) have jointly contributed to the scientific breakthrough in ULTIMATE.

Prof Nav Mustafee from CSAM shared insights into the development of a modelling framework for the symbiosis of the water cycle, its implementation and scenario experimentation to support the decision-making processes around the formation of industrial symbiosis. Prof Nav Mustafee added “This project provided us the opportunity to work with the stakeholders of three ULTIMATE case studies, based in the Netherlands, Greece and Israel, respectively, and to develop hybrid computer simulation models that integrated approaches from Operations Research and Water Engineering.”

 

CSAM delivers PhD Academy on Water and Climate Resilience

Exeter Professors Nav Mustafee and Albert Chen, delivered a PhD Academy on Water and Climate Resilience at Venice International University, Italy, on 8-12 July 2024 as part of the ARSINOE project. The event, supported by Prof Guangtao Fu (University of Exeter), Prof Patrick Williems (KU Leuven) and Prof Haifeng Jia (Tsinghua University), aimed to assist early career researchers to build capacity in climate resilience research. Profs Chen, Mustafee and Ludwig shared insights from ARSINOE project about climate scenario modelling, hazard and impact analysis, and resilience assessment with 24 ECRs from 12 countries.

CSAM hosts Interdisciplinary Workshop on Supply Chain Resilience with Arizona State University

The Centre for Simulation, Analytics and Modelling (CSAM) organised an interdisciplinary workshop on Supply Chain Resilience with the Department of Supply Chain Management (SCM) at the W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University (ASU). The workshop was held June 11-13, 2024, at Reed Hall, University of Exeter. The workshop focussed on OR/MS approaches, such as simulation and optimisation, analytical modelling, game theory, systems theory and value-stream mapping, to model supply chain resilience and thereby enhance the ability of decision-makers to anticipate, react and recover from a disruption.

The speakers from ASU included Eugene Schneller, John Fowler, Mikaella Polyviou, Thomas Choi and Timothy Richards. Enver Yücesan from INSEAD Business School, France, also presented at the workshop. From Exeter, the workshop consisted of over 25 speakers from three research centres - The Centre for Simulation, Analytics and Modelling (CSAM), The Exeter Digital Enterprise Systems (ExDES), The Peninsula Collaboration for Health Operational Research and Development (PenCHORD) - and contributions from the Departments of Management and Economics in University of Exeter Business School, Engineering Management and the Medical School.

Plenaries were delivered by Uzo Ibechukwu and Natalie Bryson from the NHS, and Timothy Richards from ASU. Online plenaries were delivered as part of the JOS Africa Focus initiative by Assilah Agigi (The University of Pretoria, South Africa), Mona Ali (The German University in Cairo, Egypt) and Mary Aming’a (Strathmore University Business School, Kenya). Tom Choi (ASU) and Nav Mustafee (CSAM) introduced the Center for Applied Research and Innovation in Supply Chain – Africa (CARISCA) and the Journal of Simulation (JOS) Africa Focus initiative.

The workshop was co-funded by the W. P. Carey School of Business and the University of Exeter Business School (UEBS Global Partnership Research Workshops 2024). The organisers of the workshop were Nav Mustafee (CSAM) and John Fowler (ASU).

 

CSAM Research Incubation Seminar on OR, AI and Automation with the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi (IITD)

The Centre for Simulation, Analytics and Modelling (CSAM) hosted Associate Professor Varun Ramamohan from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Delhi, from 19-31 May 2024. During the visit, a UEBS-IITD global partnership research incubation seminar was organised (24th May). The theme was OR, AI, and Automation; the objective was to learn about research in this sphere undertaken in CSAM, the Exeter Digital Enterprise Systems (ExDES) and IITD and forge future research collaborations. The hybrid seminar included presentations from both faculty and PGRs, with an even split between IITD and CSAM presenters.

The seminar was co-organised by Nav Mustafee (CSAM) and Varun Ramamohan (IITD). The visit and the seminar was funded through the University of Exeter Global Partnerships.

 

Operations Analytics Event at the University of Exeter Business School

The Research Methods Centre at the University of Exeter Business School has recently held its first Operations Analysis Event hosted by Professor Justin Tumlinson (Exeter), April 17th-19th, 2023. The workshop was attended by Professors Stephen Disney, Robert Boute (KULeuven), and Jan Van Meighem (Kellogg, Northwestern) and PhD students Bram De Moor, Hannah Yee, Audrey Bazerghi, Yogendra Singh and Fatamiah Alidoost. The workshop also featured discussants Dr Lina Zhang, Dr Wendy Jiao, and Professor Navonil Mustafee.

Methods tutorials were given by Stephen Disney (discrete control theory), Jan Van Meighem (Markov decision processes, dynamic programming, and robust optimization), Robert Boute (Markov chains and machine learning) and Audrey Bazerghi (dynamic programming and reinforcement learning in Python).

Research presentations were given on dual sourcing (Yee), last time buys (Bazerghi), value stream mapping and control theory (Singh), the joint replenishment problem (De Moor), smart logistics (Boute), modelling pharmaceutical supply chains (Alidoost), and lost sales inventory systems (Disney).

 

Chinese Scholarship Council sponsered PhD Researcher Qing Zhu visits CSAM for 2024

CSAM is very happy to host PhD Researcher Qing Zhu from School of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Science & Technology, China as part of the Chinese Scholarship Council Scholarship Programme.  Qing Zhu will be working with Professor Disney on applying game theory to operations and supply chain management problems.

 

International Society for Inventory Research PhD Summer School

In July 2023 Stephen Disney was invited to the International Society for Inventory Research PhD Summer School at Cardiff Business School and gave a tutorial entitled "Discrete control theory for inventory management: A tutorial". The slidedeck from this tutorial can be found here.

This was an excellent week, hosted by Aris Syntetos, Moh Naim, Qinyun Li, and Irina Harris from Cardiff Business School. In addition to the PhD students we had keynotes delivered by Robert Boute (KULeuven), Ruud Teunter (Groningen), and Li Zhou (Greenwich). Tutorials and workshops where given by Stephen Disney and Rogelio Oliva (Texas A&M University). Thanos Goltsos, Mirjam Meijer, Dennis Prak, and Patricia Rogetzer lead an Early Career Researchers session. Several other senior faculty that joined us in Cardiff for the week: Sandra Transchel (Kühne), Gerard Gaalman (Groningen), Zied Babai (Kedge Business School), Rob Hyndman (Monash) and Bahman Rostami-Tabar (Cardiff).

 

Dr Livio Fenga gives an IDSAI Research Seminar on Predicting terrorist attacks

On the 24th Janurary Dr Fenga will giev a talk entitled "Can terrorist attacks be predicted? A Quantitative Analysis and Proposal of a Hybrid Machine Learning – Statistical Model for Short-Term Forecasting of Future Attacks. Evidence from the UK, USA, and Italy". You can find out more details in here.