Operations and Supply Chain Management and Optimisation

Today’s global competitive business atmosphere, stringent concerns from environmental, social, risk and uncertainty requirements have affected global supply chain network structures for manufacturing and service industries. As a result, firms have to restructure their supply chain orientation to be more cost-effective, more sustainable, more flexible, more adaptive, more resilient, more robust, and more responsive to customer requirements and changing global markets.

Our research pioneers in applying agent-based technology in modelling, simulating and optimising the configuration of multi-objective global supply chain network designs. Our solution frameworks and methodologies ranges from simulation, exact methods, metaheuristics (i.e., genetic algorithms, ant colony optimisation, bee colony, etc.), hybrid approaches (i.e., matheuristics, artificial intelligent, machine learning, etc.). The goal is to provide sustainable competitive advantages for companies.

Our research focuses on but not limited to

multi-objective optimisation of supply chain operations to reduce cost, carbon emissions and delivery time;
a coordination of project-based supply chains with dynamically changing project portfolios;
model sourcing and inventory decisions in a multi-tier supply chain and the coordination and optimisations of such decisions across supply chain member; and
design resilient and robust supply chain network design to incorporate uncertainty, risks, and disruptions (i.e., demand, supply, natural events, etc.)

Our research covers a broad range of issues associated with supply chain, which currently focuses on the following sub-areas:

Discrete Event Simulation of Manufacturing Processes
Logistics Management
Operations & maintenance of offshore wind energy
Project supply chains and dynamic portfolio management
robust and sustainable resilient supply chain network design
Sustainable Closed-loop supply chain management

Key Academics

Academic	Title	Relevant interests
Professor Voicu Ion Sucala	Professor/ Personal Chair in Engineering Management	Modelling and simulation of manufacturing processes Lean operations Organisational analysis and adaptation to modern technologies
Dr Baris Yuce	Senior Lecturer in Engineering Management	Manufacturing assembly line digitalisation and industry 4.0 applications ie sensory based system development, monitoring and control technologies Cloud ERP solutions and integration with other digitalised platforms
Dr Martino Luis	Senior Lecturer in Engineering Management	Sustainable closed-loop supply chain network design using multi-objective optimisation Resilient global supply chain network design with disruption risks and uncertainty
Dr Natalia Hartono	Lecturer in Operations and Supply Chain Optimisation	Operations research, supply chain management Meta-heuristics, digital twins, intelligent systems, Remanufacturing, sustainability modelling, simulations, Robotic applications, ergonomics, and multi-criteria decision-making.
Dr Asela Kulatunga	Lecturer in Industrial Systems	Systems thinking towards complex problems of supply chains Modelling and Simulation of Supply chains Design and Development of Decision Support systems towards Supply chain Sustainability Container Port Operations and multimodal terminal operations optimization
Dr Lavanya Meherishi	Lecturer in Operations and Supply Chain Operations	Maritime Logistics and Port Operations Smart and Green Supply Chain Management Application of large scale optimization models to real world Operations and Supply Chain Management Problems.
Dr Wei Zhang	Lecturer in Production and Manufacturing Systems	Human-centred sustainable engineering design, manufacturing, and management in alignment with Industry 5.0 Advanced digital twinning technologies and bio-inspired intelligence applications within systems engineering Computational inverse technologies under uncertainty for understanding behaviours of materials and structures

Selected Publications

Luis, M., Irawan, C.A. and Imran, A. (2019). A two-stage method for the capacitated multi-facility location-allocation problem, Int. J. Operational Research, Vol. 35 (3), 366–377.
Irawan, C. A., Luis, M., Salhi, S., & Imran, A. (2019). The incorporation of fixed cost and multilevel capacities into the discrete and continuous single source capacitated facility location problem. Annals of Operations Research, 275(2), 367-392.
Attar, A., Irawan, C. A., Akbari, A. A., Zhong, S., & Luis, M. (2024). Multi-disruption resilient hub location–allocation network design for less-than-truckload logistics. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 190, 104260.
Rajaram, A., Meherishi, L., Jovanova, J., & Coraddu, A. (2024, May). Utilizing Amphibious AGVs to Optimize Container Transshipment for Deep Sea and Hinterland Operations. In International Marine Design Conference.
Attar, A., Jin, Y., Luis, M., Zhong, S., & Sucala, V. I. (2023, December). Simulation-Based Analyses and Improvements of the Smart Line Management System in Canned Beverage Industry: A Case Study in Europe. In 2023 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) (pp. 2124-2135). IEEE.

Projects

KTP with Smart Manufacturing ltd Bideford (Academic supervisor: Prof Voicu Ion Sucala, KTP Associate: Sam John Abraham)

This KTP project is creating and implementing a dual-production business model and a novel modelling and simulation tool to enable the optimisation of multi production manufacturing flows. This is enabling Smart Manufacturing to design and manufacture new and highly specialised equipment for ATEX rated environments in parallel with its traditional bespoke products. The KTP also developed a novel knowledge management tool that helped Smart Manufacturing acquire and formalise the highly specialised knowledge on ATEX regulations and practices. Work is ongoing to extend and generalise this tool so that it can be used by manufacturing SMEs to consolidate compliance knowledge in resource constrained environments.

Impact:

EPSRC Internet of Food Things Network Plus on "DISTINCT: IoT and big data for productive, safe and sustainable aquaculture" (PI: Dr Miying Yang, Co-I: Dr Martino Luis)

The project seeks to explore digital technologies and new business models to improve aquaculture farming productivity, food safety and sustainability across supply chain. This project captures the challenges across the aquaculture supply chain, uses Internet of Things and big data to help aquaculture farmers monitor the changes of the farming water, so that they can better control water quality, take preventative actions to reduce death and disease, and reduce environmental impact.

BINDER - sustainaBle supply chaIN and market opportunities iDentification for waste tilE powder (PI: Dr Martino Luis and Dr Raffaele Vinai)

The project focuses on transforming non-marketable ceramics and porcelain (a waste stream which is financially costly and has high carbon emission rates) into PORCEMENT - a highly profitable cement-like material to substitute concrete binders. The project was funded by the UKRI National Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Research programme (NICER) programme.

We teamed up with PORCEMENT Ltd and ARC MARINE Ltd to develop new product and processes where porcelain and ceramic waste will be reused and processed as supplementary cementitious materials. The project addresses the three principles for circular economy as proposed by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation: Eliminate waste and pollution; Circulate products and materials at their highest value; Regenerate nature.

Our experiments demonstrated the suitability of tile powder use as supplementary cementitious materials and could save up to 20% carbon emissions. The design of sustainable supply chain operations ensured that material flows (supply- demand) were collected and distributed optimally considering transport pollution reduction. It created a step-change in adoption of circular economy approaches, by validating the feasibility and profitability of using waste products as supplementary cementitious materials.

The project outputs have opened future research avenues in the field of industrial symbiosis, which is part and parcel of circular economy. Thus, researchers in industrial symbiosis will also benefit from the results of this project.