Doctoral researchers, Eleanor Borrill and Huazhang Tian, attended the 11th International Federation of Automatic Control Conference on Manufacturing, Modelling, Management and Control (IFAC MIM 2025) in Trondheim, Norway.
Known for being one of the most impactful international conferences in academia, this four-day conference (from 30th June to 3rd July 2025) gathered over 700 participants from 51 countries, providing a fantastic platform for knowledge exchange and communication among experts and researchers.
Eleanor is an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) -funded member of the Energy Institute, based in the School of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Civil Engineering. Her multidisciplinary PhD research focuses on sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), spanning experimental SAF combustion research and SAF supply-chain management. She has also recently joined the South Yorkshire Sustainability Centre as a research associate, where her work centres on SAF lifecycle assessment (LCA), supply-chain resilience modelling, and decision-making science.
At the conference, Eleanor presented her research titled ‘Supply-chain Resilience for UK Waste-Based SAF Feedstocks with a Focus on Achieving a Circular Economy’. This study presents a novel, multidisciplinary evaluation of UK-specific, waste-based SAF feedstocks by integrating feedstock availability assessment, life cycle assessment (LCA), and multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA). It addresses key research gaps related to the UK’s SAF potential, provides a comparative analysis of environmental impacts under consistent conditions, and demonstrates the integration of MCDA methods using quantitative data to inform strategic decisions for building resilient and sustainable SAF supply chains.
Reflecting on her experience at the IFAC MIM conference, Eleanor said: “It was a privilege to share my recent research at IFAC MIM and engage with leading experts in supply-chain management and systems engineering. Learning how others are addressing complex supply-chain and decarbonisation challenges gave me new perspectives on how lifecycle assessment and decision analysis can drive resilient, circular economy solutions across different sectors.”
Huazhang, a PhD researcher at the Advanced Resource Efficiency Centre (AREC), which is based in the Supply Chain, Operations and Logistics Applied Research Centre (SOLARC) under Sheffield University Management School (SUMS), is exploring the future of hydrogen energy, where an international green hydrogen supply chain (GHSC) replaces the fossil fuel system.
His research, 'Energy Security, Resilience and Efficiency Performance Evaluation for GHSC', was presented in the session 'Supply Chain Resilience and Viability'. Huazhang’s project aims to integrate energy security evaluation into the optimisation model of the international green hydrogen supply chain in order to extend its functional capabilities. Using Dynamic Network Data Envelopment Analysis (DNDEA), the energy security performance of the optimised results will be evaluated, with changes tracked over the long term.
Huazhang said, "It’s been an excellent experience. Listening to other presentations helped me learn about the latest trends in supply chain resilience. It was also great to see so many people working to apply viability theory across different industries. During the discussions, we discovered many shared challenges across various supply chains, as well as ways viability theory can help improve real-world practices."