Adaptive resilient strategies for supply chain networks

Due to globalization of economy, the supply chains are vulnerable to disruptive events. In addition, lean initiatives often lead to single supplier, which is vulnerable to supply disruption. In this paper, two strategies are proposed for generating supply chain networks to improve the resilience of supply chain networks: hierarchical preferential attachment and hierarchical random attachment. The supply chain resilience is evaluated using supply availability and the demand to supply ratio. Disruptions in the supply chain are modeled using random and targeted disruptions. The paper also designed an algorithm to recover the supply chain network from disruptions, based on the network attachment rules (preferential attachment and random attachment). Through a simulation study, the recovered supply chain is shown to have better resilience compared to a single supplier supply chain network.