Cluster D – Supply Chain Viability

Supply chain viability: Effectiveness, costs to business and societal value

Cluster Description

Cluster D aims to develop practical measures for companies and policy makers to improve the viability of intertwined supply chains. It will evaluate the effectiveness of measures and analyse the associated private and public costs and benefits. It consists of seven work packages (WPs), the interrelationships of which are shown in the figure below.

Team

• Prof. Dr. Tobias Börger
• Prof. Dr. Dr. habil. Dmitry Ivanov
• Dr. Jürgen Meyerhoff
• Vivian Samstag

Work Packages

Work Package 1 seeks to develop, validate and apply new methods for stress testing supply chain networks, focusing on the use of digital supply chain twins. The results of this work package will provide the conceptual framework for the other research strands.

Work Package 2 will come up with novel stress testing methodologies for intertwined and configurable and adaptive supply chain designs. The methodological novelty lies in the creation of an integrated adaptability to experiment with and combine components of the supply chain network in an unpredictable way. This allows a problem with unknown unknowns to be solved, rather than relying on probability predictions and anticipation of disruptions. The technical implementation is done by designing digital supply chain models in the simulation and optimisation software anyLogistix.

Work Package 3 will conduct a firm survey using a discrete choice experiment to assess empirically the trade-offs firms are willing to make between potentially higher costs and improved resilience of their supply chains.

Work Package 4 tests various proactive and reactive measures to improve the resilience of networked supply chains. The technical implementation of the effectiveness testing of the digital supply chain models from Work Package will be carried out using anyLogistix. A set of efficiency, resilience and sustainability performance indicators will be used to test the effectiveness of the resilience strategies for interlinked supply chains.

Work Package 5 will start with an industry-based analysis of best practice in assessing the performance of resilience and recovery measures. Particular emphasis will be placed on analysing the empirical understanding of interactions, their costs and value to stakeholders.

In Work Package 6, a discrete choice experiment will be conducted to assess the additional willingness to pay of consumers for a secure supply of market goods in selected sectors.

The aim of Work Package7 is to summarise the results of WP3 to WP5 to carry out a welfare analysis.