The math working to solve the UK’s supply chain crisis

The calculations behind filling supermarket shelves are dizzyingly complex – but it all
starts with the x and y you know from school

Michael Brooks
The Guardian, Sunday 12 September 2021

Nando’s put it succinctly on its Twitter feed last month: “The UK supply chain is having a
bit of a mare right now.” Getting things on to supermarket shelves, through your letterbox
or into a restaurant kitchen has certainly become problematic of late. It’s hard to know
exactly where to pin the blame, though Covid and Brexit have surely played a part. What
we can do is give thanks for algebra, because things would be so much worse without it.

It’s likely that you have mixed feelings about algebra. Even if you could knuckle down and
manage it in school, you probably wondered why it was important to solve an equation
involving x raised to the power of 2 or why you should want to find a and b when a + b = 3
and 2a – b = 12. You might even feel that your scepticism has been vindicated: the
chances are that you have never done algebra in your post-school life. But that doesn’t
mean that the jumble of letters, numbers and missing things that we call algebra is
useless. Whether it’s supermarket groceries, a new TV or a parcel from Aunt Emily, they
all reach your home through some attempt to solve an equation and find the missing
number. Algebra is the maths that delivers.

Algebra has been around for millennia. The word comes from the Arabic word al-jabr in
the title of a ninth-century book on calculation, but ancient peoples in Babylon, India,
China and Africa had been solving algebraic equations long before that. It is, essentially,
the art of finding unknown numbers, given certain others. The sought-after hidden factor
was usually referred to in Latin as the cossa, or “thing”, and so algebra was often known as
the “cossick art”: the art of the thing.

Early adopters of algebra didn’t have the luxury of solving equations: until the 16th
century, everything was written out in words. An early student of the cossick art might
find themselves face to face with something like the following: two men are leading oxen
along a road and one says to the other: “Give me two oxen and I’ll have as many as you
have.” Then the other said: “Now you give me two oxen and I’ll have double the number
you have.” How many oxen were there and how many did each have?

This poser comes from a compendium of puzzles, published in around AD800,

called Problems to Sharpen the Young. It is not that different from the questions we all
faced in maths lessons at school and a prime use of algebra today is still about calculating
numbers of oxen on the road – for stocking the butcher’s counter at your supermarket.

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“Stocking warehouses is a complicated problem,” says Anna Moss, principal data scientist
at Ocado Technology. Moss’s role involves ensuring that the amounts of stock ordered
from suppliers are sufficient to satisfy customer demand, but do not exceed the
warehouse storage capacity and, importantly, minimise food waste.

Moss, you might not be surprised to learn, is a maths whiz. She has worked for Intel in the
past and frequently publishes her mathematics research in academic journals. Applying
such expertise to grocery delivery might seem like overkill, but the logistical puzzles
involved are every bit as challenging as anything she has faced elsewhere.

The maths of logistics starts with algebra – linear algebra, to be precise. This is algebra
where the variables (data about warehouse stock, for example) tend to be processed in
ways that don’t 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 together contain all you need
to find out the relationships between the variables. Its equations are, essentially,
mathematical spreadsheets where a single operation can process a huge array of data,
expose the relationships between them all and allow the mathematician to optimise one
particular chosen outcome. The same trick lies behind Google searches, flight scheduling
and parcel delivery; even the way your virtual shopping basket is delivered to your
computer screen involves linear algebra in the logistics of routing information through the
internet.

Logistics hasn’t stood still with linear algebra, however. It has been developed into
algorithms for “linear programming” and “mixed integer programming” and various other
odd-sounding mathematical routines, such as “combinatorial optimisation”, “greedy
heuristics” and “simulated annealing”.

“You can think of this as computational algebra,” says Keith Moore of US logistics
software company Autoscheduler.AI. And it’s all done with just one purpose: to deliver to
every customer, on time and in full – OTIF as it’s known in the trade. And, as anyone
working in post-Brexit supermarkets knows, that’s never actually possible. “In every
distribution centre I’ve been around, the constraints keep the operation from perfectly
maximising OTIF,” Moore says.

It’s Moore’s job to maximise what is possible for a wide range of clients, including
Unilever and Procter & Gamble. He doesn’t use paper and pen or a calculator. “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.”

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Instead, the necessary algebra is programmed into software. The exact nature of the
algorithm at work is, of course, a trade secret. That’s why numerous companies refused to
speak to me for this article: they were worried their mathematicians might say too much.
Sainsbury’s, DPD and Hermes all declined an interview request on the basis that the
mathematical tricks used to improve their service are, as DPD’s PR put it, “not something
they want their competitors to know about”.

What we do know is that delivery is a terrifying algebraic challenge, with far more
variables than you ever encountered in any exam question. Ocado’s optimisation
algorithms, for instance, consider how to pack ordered items in the smallest possible
number of bags, as well as the best path to be travelled by a robot in a warehouse or by a
personal shopper in a store picking the products from the shelves. But they also have to
factor in the time slot that you selected, the capacity of the van and myriad other factors
such as achieving minimal environmental impact. “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.”

Then there are the optimal delivery routes, given the location of warehouses and stores
relative to your home address. “We know the travel distances between all pairs of these
locations,” Moss says. “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.”

Assuming you can find drivers and fuel, the mathematics of delivering goods efficiently is
actually an instance of a long-standing problem for mathematicians: the travelling
salesman problem. Cut to the bone, it is this: how do you find the shortest path that allows
you to visit a number of locations only once?

You don’t have to treat this as an algebra problem, strictly speaking, although linear
algebra does provide one angle of attack. Others come through algebra-derived disciplines
such as graph theory. However, the precise nature of the mathematics is somewhat moot,
since there is no way to solve the travelling salesman problem once you are dealing with a
realistic number of destinations.

While there are six options for travelling from a distribution centre to three destinations,
there are 479m possible ways to deliver to just 12 destinations. A single parcel delivery
driver might deliver 60 or 70 parcels a day and there are trillions of possible routes for
that relatively small number of deliveries.

No one expects even a computer to work through them all, so software, such as UPS’s
Orion, makes a guess at a best route, examines its issues and then improves on it. This is

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the approach known as heuristics. It is another high-powered relative of school algebra
and tries to get as close as possible to optimal solutions. Although it starts with
guesswork, it’s still validated by maths. “Mathematics gives us the confidence that we are
close enough to the best option,” says Ravi Ahuja, founder and CEO of two logistics
optimisation companies Optym and Axele.

Nowhere is this more important than in the airline industry. Here, variables include what
routes to fly, how many flights to operate per route and at what times and, of course, the
best way to schedule each plane, crew member and passenger for maximum profit.
“Timing is everything for airlines, as that enables inbound planes to connect with
outbound planes, crews to go from one flight to another, passengers to fly when they want
to and make flight connections,” Ahuja says. “For a large passenger airline that flies
thousands of flights a day, it is a massive and tremendously complex mathematical
problem.”

And you solve it with algebra. “We use several techniques, including greedy heuristics –
take one decision at a time but the best one – or mixed integer programming, which relies
on linear algebra,” Ahuja says. He is proud to say that his algebra skills once allowed him
to find an optimal solution for a hideous set of equations on behalf of an airline and the
company saw its profitability surge by millions of dollars a year.

So learning algebra wasn’t a waste of time – for Ahuja and the others who keep our
deliveries coming in these trying times, at least. Moss never felt it was, to be fair: maths
was always her favourite subject and she has built her career on “a solid math base
learned in school”, as she puts it. “I consider myself lucky,” she says. “I still enjoy doing
maths and have a chance to do the things that both truly interest me and make a
difference to society.”

Not that these mathematicians all keep things strictly professional. “I sleep pretty well
every night knowing that we’re helping companies reduce costs and run greener
operations,” Moore says. “But from a personal perspective, building an algorithmic
fantasy football team that absolutely destroyed the 2019 NFL season was pretty great too.”