Supply Chain Impact Modelling – Simulation and Machine Learning approach

Abstract

An epidemic outbreak can cause huge impact not only on human lives alone but also on other sectors relying on it. Supply chain operations are also largely affected from these outbreaks. From the recent epidemic outbreak, severe disruptions affecting both the supply and demand of supply chains were observed. Supply chains being optmized for maximum profits, reduced inventories were less immune to epidemic outbreaks. As a result these firms were left with huge losses during the recent outbreak. This has forced executives to adopt resilience factors to their supply chains. Thus for redesign of supply chains, executives required clear knowledge of how impacts were going to affect their firms. In this paper, simulation modelling for impact analysis of supply chains during an epidemic outbreak is illustrated. This provided a detailed quantitative overview of the impact for executives. Also simulation results were further processed to generate datasets suitable for developing decision support tools using various machine learning algorithms.