which simplifies to K (m,n,p) = J (m,n,p) V , in the case that the vial exhibits no relevant thermal gradients; a reasonable assumption for pallet freezing given the long duration of the process, which is typically on the order of several hours or even days. As outlined in section 2.1.3, the thermal evolution of a vial, and thus its nucleation frequency, may also depend on the thermal evolution of the neighboring vials and as a consequence on the sequence of neighboring nucleation events. The value of K (m,n,p) in such a system therefore depends not only on time, but also on the stochastic occurrence of prior nucleation events. The type of stochastic process, where past stochastic events impact the future, is known as self-exciting point process, and may be interpreted as a step-wise inhomogeneous Poisson process. We may express the probability