Global semiconductor supply chain resilience challenges and mitigation strategies: A novel integrated decomposed fuzzy set Delphi, WINGS and QFD model

Abstract

The recent COVID-19 pandemic, Ukrainian-Russian conflict, China-US trade war, and current environmental concerns regarding carbon emissions have all made the semiconductor supply chain (SCSC) more vulnerable. In addition, the uncertainty of global SCSC is increasingly obscured owing to several resilience challenges within the exiting supply chain network. Thus, supply chain resilience issues are becoming popular among researchers and policymakers. Unfortunately, there is a lack of systematic research on evaluation of resilience challenges and mitigation strategies for the global SCSC. Additionally, existing models are incompetent to capture the optimistic and pessimistic views of experts during interaction assessment and mitigation strategy evaluation in an uncertain environment. Hence, this research, for the first time, develops a novel integrated Decomposed Fuzzy Set (DFS)-based Delphi, Weighted Influence Non-linear Gauge System (WINGS), and Quality Function Deployment (QFD) model to identify and assess strength-interaction relationship between resilience challenges and mitigation strategies. The findings demonstrated that out of thirteen resilience challenges, seven were identified as causal group resilience challenges while the remaining six were classified as result group resilience challenges indicating that addressing the causal group resilience challenges may directly influence the mitigation of the result group resilience challenges. According to findings of DFS-WINGS analysis, the resilience challenges “Geopolitical tensions” and “Natural disasters” are the two most priority causal group resilience challenges that can significantly influence the result group system components. Furthermore, the DSF-QFD analysis confirmed that the mitigation strategies “Investing in semiconductor R&D and developing regional semiconductor manufacturing facilities” and “Diversification of key components suppliers and promoting domestic manufacturing” received the highest correlation among the mitigation strategies to address the current resilience issues faced by global SCSC. The study findings make a significant contribution to policymaking. The roles of resilience challenges and importance of mitigation strategies both can be used as benchmarks for the SCSC to make the global SCSC more resilient and sustainable.