The agri-food supply chain is important to global food security, yet it faces growing challenges in balancing sustainability, fairness, and resilience [1]. Increasing pressure to reduce food waste, lower environmental impacts, and ensure ethical resource distribution makes this project timely and crucial. The project aims to develop automated techniques from computing science to assess and optimise agri-food supply chains, integrating key aspects from agri-food systems such as sustainability, food safety, risk assessment, and transparency, building on the supervisors’ preliminary work on quantitative verification of opacity and observability in multi-agent systems [2,3,4,5]. This project will contribute to enhancing trust and integrity within the supply chain by addressing organisational culture, transparency, and fairness in decision-making.

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The student will model agri-food supply chains using game-theoretic and probabilistic approaches from CS, incorporating factors like logistics, resource allocation, greenhouse gas emissions, and ethical considerations like fairness and transparency from agri-food systems. They will formalise these properties and develop algorithms to verify them, using tools like probabilistic model-checking to ensure the supply chain operates sustainably and equitably. Practical case studies - such as organic farming supply chains - will provide real-world application, with a focus on reducing food waste, ensuring food safety, and addressing risks like corporate crime and mendacious behaviour.

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Based at the SUSTAIN CDT, the student will gain expertise in sustainability, resilience, food security, and risk assessment, while also developing CS technical skills in formal verification, multi-agent systems, and computational modelling. Through multidisciplinary collaboration, they will explore the intersection of sustainability with integrity, transparency, and organisational culture. This training will equip the student with a comprehensive skill set to address sustainability challenges in the agri-food sector, preparing them for roles in technology, food security, and corporate sustainability, where ethical practices and risk management are critical.

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[1] L. Manning, Being Resilient in Challenging Times in Food Supply Chains. University of Lincoln. International Conference on Industry 4.0 for Agri-food Supply Chains: Addressing Socio-economic and Environmental Challenges in Ukraine 2023.

[2] Y. Bouzembrak, N. Liu, W. Mu, A. Gavai, L. Manning, F. Butler et al. Data driven food fraud vulnerability assessment using Bayesian Network: Spices supply chain. Food Control:164:110616 (2024).

[3] C. Mu and D. Clark, Verifying Opacity Properties in Security Systems. IEEE Trans. Dependable Secure Computing. 20(2): 1450-1460 (2023)

[4] C. Mu and J. Pang, On Observability Analysis in Multiagent Systems. ECAI 2023: 1755-1762

[5] C. Mu and M. Najib and N. Oren, Responsibility-aware Strategic Reasoning in Probabilistic Multi-Agent Systems. arXiv:2411.00146 (2024)