It’s hard to avoid the realities of the UK’s supply chain crisis at the moment - from empty supermarket shelves to restaurants forced to adapt their menus.
UK retailers are even preparing for stock shortages across the board in the run-up to Christmas as well as the British Chambers of Commerce warning that the UK could see a steep decline in economic growth over the coming months.
And it's all because of a very specific cocktail of Brexit and pandemic issues.
It’s not sounding particularly great but what we can do is be grateful for the algebra at work attempting to control the disruption. Yes that’s right, algebra.
For example, when a delivery arrives at your home, this is after an equation has been solved and a missing number found. As The Guardian put it, ‘Algebra is the maths that delivers’.
The crux of algebra is that it finds previously unknown numbers when given certain others.
Talking to The Guardian, principal data scientist at Ocado Technology, Anna Moss, said: “Stocking warehouses is a complicated problem.”
Fancy job title aside, Anna Moss' role ensures that the amount of stock ordered from suppliers is balanced, enough to satisfy the demand from customers whilst not exceeding warehouse storage facilities and creating food waste.
Moss is what you might call a maths mogul, her mathematical research is often published in academic journals.
Linear algebra is where the maths of logistics begins. This area of algebra is where the variables (eg data regarding warehouse stock) tends to be processed in ways that do not depend on the square, the cube or any other power. So y = 4x would be an operation in linear algebra; y = 4x2 would not.
Linear algebra explores solutions for sets of equations that when combined contain everything that you need to discover the relationships between the variables.
Equations in this format essentially act as a mathematical spreadsheet of sorts in which a single operation is able to process a large array of data, revealing the relationship between them and giving the mathematician to optimise one chosen outcome.
The same process is at work behind Google search technology, flight scheduling and parcel delivery when even your virtual shopping basket is delivered to your device via linear algebra in the logistics routing information through the internet. This linear algebra has been utilised to develop algorithms.
As reported by The Guardian, Keith Moore of US logistics company Autoscheduler.AI, said: “You can think of this as computational algebra.”
It’s in place with one sole purpose, to deliver successfully to every customer, on time and in full (OTIF), but as supermarkets in post-Brexit Britain know all too well, this is never actually possible.
Moore continued: “Even at a single distribution centre, they are collecting gigabytes of data every minute and that data changes constantly. It’s not just impractical to have analysts and people sitting in a room doing math to make decisions, it’s completely unfeasible.”
This is why the appropriate algebra is programmed into software - the exact algorithm at work is a trade secret.
This algebra however, unlike a secondary school algebra question, faces a large amount of variables. “All these criteria are given weights based on their relative importance and this weighted combination serves as a single value to be optimised,” Moss says.
“In addition, our problem keeps changing all the time, as customers place new orders and edit the existing ones. Our algorithms have to cope with these on-the-fly changes.”
For home delivery for example, there are optimal delivery routes to consider and location of warehouses relative to your address. Moss commented: “We know the travel distances between all pairs of these locations. The problem is to find the best van routes or the way to assign orders to vans and determine the sequence for each van in which to deliver its assigned orders.”
The maths is prevalent at all stages of the supply chain and essentially allows businesses to assess what the best options are for them, something which has been thrown up in the air thanks to the widespread disruption.
While algebra is unlikely to be the most popular subject area at school when we're in our teens and attempting to grasp the concept, this is just one example of how it keeps the world turning and in situations as we find ourselves in now, attempts to find balance again.
As Moss put it: “I consider myself lucky. I still enjoy doing maths and have a chance to do the things that both truly interest me and make a difference to society.”
