PhD project title and outline, including interdisciplinary dimension :
Resilient Water Management as a Circular Economy: Network analysis of pollution abatement in the NI water system

Clean drinking water is the most important element to sustain life and a prosperous economy.  This proposed research project brings together elements from diverse scientific fields to build innovative perspectives on water management systems and pollution abatement in the production of clean drinking water.  The project draws on:

(1) theory of managing resilient Supply Chain Networks (SCN);
(2) theories of Circular Economies (CE);
(3) network analysis of SCNs;
(4) the game theoretic approach to cost allocation in complex networks; and
(5) environmental economics of pollution abatement.

The aim is to investigate a drinking water SCN as a CE with an explicit network structure, determined by the associated river basins, pipe systems, pumping stations, and water cleaning facilities.  Vulnerabilities are spread throughout this network.  The SCN’s ability to recover from external shocks determines its resilience.  Costs related to addressing thus resilience as well as the cleaning of the water have to be allocated appropriately to the suppliers of water as well as the users of clean drinking water.  The recycling of unclean water into clean drinking water makes this a perfect example of a circular economy that has an explicit network structure.

This project consists of two stages:

I:  Building of theoretical models of a water SCN as a network-structured CE.  This draws on existing theories and insights from the five theoretical fields listed above.  This stage would include visits to the VU University Amsterdam to discuss cost allocation models with the international co-supervisor Dr Rene van den Brink.

II:  Confrontation of the devised models with the data provided by the non-HEI partner NI Water to estimate and calibrate a practical model to quantify the resilience of the NI drinking water SCN and to determine an efficient allocation of production costs of drinking water.

Primary Supervisor: Professor Rob Gilles  (Queen’s Management School)
Secondary supervisors: 
Dr Jelena Vlajic (Queen’s Management School)
Dr Rene van den Brink (Associate Professor of Mathematical Economics - VU University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
External Partner/Organisation: Northern Ireland Water (NI Water)