Home // International Journal On Advances in Software, volume 16, numbers 3 and 4, 2023 // View article

Identification of Critical Groups and Other Supply Chain Vulnerabilities

Authors:
Tim vor der Brück

Keywords: supply chain management; critical nodes; critical groups; critical links; robust optimization; supply chain risks

Abstract:
The impact of a supplier or transportation link breakdown in a supply chain can strongly differ depending on which nodes/links are affected. While the breakdown of producers of rarely needed products or backup suppliers might result in no or only minor repercussions, the breakdown of central suppliers or transportation links, also called critical nodes/links, can be fatal and may cause a severe delivery delay or even a complete production failure of certain product lines. Therefore, it is of high importance for a company to identify its critical nodes/links in the supply chain and take precautionary actions such as organizing additional backup suppliers or alternative ways of transportation. In this paper, we describe a novel method to identify critical groups, nodes, and links in a supply chain based on robust optimization, which has the advantage that supply chain risks are considered, and also precise risk cost estimates regarding the possible breakdown of each supplier node are provided. Afterwards, we introduce the concept of Critical Groups, which is a generalization of Critical Nodes to potentially more than one supplier. Finally, we demonstrate this method on an example supply chain and discuss its distribution of critical nodes, links, and groups.

Pages: 151 to 159

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2023. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 30, 2023

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2628