Ensuring Supply for Emergency Services – Modeling Supply Chains with Incomplete Sets of Data

Abstract

Supply chain simulation could be used to identify the risk of bottlenecks due to disruptions in global supply chains and to improve the availability of products and materials for emergency services. However, these stakeholders do not have the capabilities and in-house know-how about their supply chains required for reliable simulation results. To overcome this issue, this manuscript provides a method to enable the modeling of supply chains without a comprehensive knowledge of all process parameters and nodes. It consists of generic data containers, each representing typical nodes within a supply chain with plausible generic process parameters, boundaries, and distributed values. We present the conceptual feasibility of the approach through a case study and demonstrate the methodology for modeling a supply chain for detailed bottleneck analysis and automated risk assessment of a public health and safety supply chain.