Supply Chain Resiliency in the Pharmaceutical Industry – a Simulation-Based Approach

Abstract

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the key role of the pharmaceutical industry and its supply chain operations in society. Like in many other sectors, this pandemic has unveiled important vulnerabilities and weaknesses across the pharmaceutical distribution network, calling the attention for the importance of resiliency, flexibility, and sustainability strategies.One of the key challenges regarding resiliency is the ability to understand and anticipate the supply chain behaviour under uncertainty and dynamically manage capacity. In order to address this challenge, this paper proposes a simulation-based approach with a twofold goal: i) to understand the pharmaceutical supply chain network dynamics, in order to fast-track vulnerabilities and anticipate risks propagation across the network; and ii) to support decisionmaking for enhancing resiliency and flexibility, through capacity management strategic decisions.The main contributions of this work are grounded on the integration and exploitation of different simulation paradigms, in order to understand the cause-effect relationships in complex systems, under several disruption scenarios. In this way, the disruption risks and their propagation are identified throughout the supply chain network, providing insights for the proactive and timely development of contingency and risk mitigation plans.

A Simulation Approach for the Design of More Sustainable and Resilient Supply Chains in the Pharmaceutical Industry

“…The simulation model was developed as an extension of the authors' previous work [11], using the AnyLogic software as shown in the conceptual framework presented in Figure 3.…”

“…Following the authors' previous work [11], a simulation-based approach is proposed here considering the integration of Agent-Based Simulation (ABS) and Discrete-Event-Simulation (DES) techniques, for the design and planning of the pharmaceutical supply chain. The proposed methodology allows an assessment of the impacts of resilience-driven strategies on the SC's overall performance to be made, and can be used to guide the decisionmaking process toward trade-off solutions, leading to waste reduction and increased access to medicines in low-income regions.…”

“…Moreover, recent research has demonstrated its unique capabilities in the exploitation and analysis of multiple trade-offs in decision making, regarding SC resiliency and/or sustainability [11,24,28,29].…”

“…The products are in different life cycle stages with corresponding expected demand profiles based on the authors' previous work [11] and depicted in Figure 8;…”