Supermarket shelves in the UK have been empty, construction materials have run short, and semiconductor chips have been in scarce supply—repeated shocks from pandemics, climate change, and war have exposed how brittle the nation’s food, fashion, and critical mineral supply chains really are. The problem is that the UK already has the scientific and engineering talent to model these tangled, multi-tier supply chains as complex systems, but that expertise is scattered across universities, companies, and government labs, with no shared tools or common language to connect them. RiSC+ aims to break those silos by building a network of academics, industry leaders, and decision-makers who will feed data from biology, chemistry, geography, AI, and digital twins into a single intelligent digital tool. That tool will run simulations to test where a disruption in one tier—say, a dye shortage—cascades into gaps elsewhere, and what intervention stops it. If it works, the result is a secure, scenario-testing platform that lets policymakers and businesses see risks before they hit, and make decisions that keep supply chains resilient through 2050. This is not fundamental science; it is applied systems engineering aimed at a concrete, everyday consequence: fewer empty shelves and more reliable access to the materials the country depends on.
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The UK government has set out a strategy to enhance our national security and the UK's resilience to a rapidly changing world. This has reached new levels of urgency in the wake of repeated systematic shocks from financial crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, climate emergency and conventional armed conflict. As a result, the UK's food, fashion and critical minerals supply chains have suffered from: shortages of semi-conductor chips, construction materials, synthetic fibres and dyes; gaps on supermarket shelves; and delivery delays, among others, with palpable detrimental effects in our economy and peoples' everyday lives. It is vital we understand the potential risks to UK supply chains, how they might cascade through supply chain tiers and the interventions that might be needed to increase their resilience. The UK has the breadth and depth of research, innovation and technological capabilities to model supply chains as complex systems and harness the power of data and scenario modelling to identify cascading risks in supply chains, as well as the associated impacts and trade-offs across the environment, economy, security and society. However, this knowledge and expertise is currently siloed within institutions. It is vital that the UK innovation ecosystem works in partnership taking a truly multidisciplinary approach to address systemic issues and accelerate impact for the UK. The Reimagining Supply Chains Network Plus (RiSC+) is a community of influential change agents, who are passionate about collaborating and sharing their expert knowledge and industry connections to enable a transformation in how we think about and model current and future supply chains. RiSC+, led by Queen's University, Belfast (QUB), has gathered a wealth of academics in complexity science, supply chain management, biological sciences, chemical engineering, geography, architecture, AI and digital twins - spread across an EDI-diverse group of senior and earlier career researchers - strengthened by the modelling power of QUB's Global Innovation Institute's (GII) professional engineering team, and advised by senior influencers, industry leaders and decision makers in food, critical minerals and fashion drawn from across the UK. The ultimate aim of this RiSC+ is to represent the highly complex supply chains by employing innovative tools from system thinking, AI, simulation and machine learning - fed by data and expertise from a number of specialist domains; and build capacity to sustain, build on, and enhance the legacy of the network. The output will be a secure and intelligent digital tool with the capability to run simulations to test targeted interventions, supporting informed decision making towards robust and resilient UK supply chains by 2050. Through the workstream architecture, RiSC+ will: model UK supply chains as complex systems for resiliency; demonstrate opportunities for reorientation and future novel approaches which push the supply chains well beyond incremental change; deliver capacity building opportunities for early career researchers and professional staff to strengthen and broaden their skills and career opportunities; deliver world leading, innovation driven research and development collaborations; grow and strengthen relationships in the UK innovation ecosystem; deliver high quality research publications and that pave future funding opportunities; and embed research and innovation into society. RiSC+ will capture and strengthen the power of the extraordinary talent and creativity in this nation to secure the UK's status as a science superpower and a global leader in building highly sophisticated, intelligent digital supply chains; and create a nexus for global talent and investment
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