Towards the development of quantitative resilience indices for Multi-Echelon Assembly Supply Chains

Abstract

This paper develops a framework to create resilience indices for multi-echelon assembly supply chain (MEASC) networks. Each supplier within this network assembles a component from a series of sub-components received from other suppliers, thus, disruptions at suppliers can cascade and significantly affect the performance of the whole network. The framework combines the decision rules developed in [32] and Monte Carlo simulation. These indices can evaluate the vulnerability of a MEASC network to different types of disruptive events and to estimate with statistical confidence the impact of such events. As an extension, this approach is applied to individual suppliers to create individual resilience indices and identify the most vulnerable suppliers within the network. The resilience indices can further be used to understand how certain mitigation efforts improve resilience and identify improvements that potentially make the network less vulnerable to a certain type of disruptive event. It can further be applied to understand how certain mitigation efforts improve resilience (e.g., safety stocks at suppliers or requiring key suppliers to have back-up capacities at their other assembly locations), which is important in determining thecorrect requirements of the MEASC network to meet certain post-disruptive event performance criteria.