To bridge the existing freezing research at single-vial scale with process design at commercial scale, we recently introduced a batch-scale model for the freezing stage in freeze-drying. The model simulates the evolution of temperature and ice mass for an arbitrary number of vials packed in two spatial dimensions, and thus predicts the nucleation and solidification behavior of all vials, as well as the process duration. It is entirely derived from first principles and explicitly takes into account the stochastic nature of ice nucleation.