A modeling methodology for supply chain synthesis and disruption analysis

The concept of an integrated or synthesized supply chain is a strategy for managing today’s globalized and customer driven supply chains in order to better meet customer demands. Synthesizing individual entities into an integrated supply chain can be a challenging task due to a variety of factors including conflicting objectives, mismatched incentives and constraints of the individual entities. Furthermore, understanding the effects of disruptions occurring at any point in the system is difficult when working toward synthesizing supply chain operations. Therefore, the goal of this research is to present a modeling methodology to manage the synthesis of a supply chain by linking hierarchical levels of the system and to model and analyze disruptions in the integrated supply chain. The contribution of this research is fourfold: (1) supply chain systems can be modeled hierarchically, (2) the performance of synthesized supply chain system can be evaluated quantitatively, (3) reachability analysis is used to evaluate the system performance and verify whether a specific state is reachable, allowing the user to understand the extent of effects of a disruption and, (4) an industry case is presented to empirically validate the proposed methodology.