An analysis of risks and vulnerabilities in supply networks

Abstract

Today's supply networks have become more and more efficient but also complex and prone to strong disturbances that may generate blocking and starving effects. This study provides a risk analysis of supply networks based on a stochastic model of product flows subject to strong disturbances and threshold constraints. The main objective is to construct vulnerability indices from simulation of the multistage system, both in nominal conditions when an ARIMA model describes the system dynamics and in disturbed running conditions when one or several state variables are subject to saturation effects.