The purpose of this project is to apply computational tools from topological data analysis (TDA) to study logistical systems such as freight networks. TDA is a relatively nascent research area that allows one to describe geometric properties of a data set, such as connectivity, existence of holes, or clustering, in a way that imposes minimal assumptions on parametric structures like coordinate systems or forms of probability distributions. In recent years, TDA has been successfully applied to many different scientific domains, such as aviation, path planning, and time series analysis. To the best of the author's knowledge, this project will be the first to apply TDA to the logistics domain.
