Development of supply chain network robustness index

As an event-driven system, a supply chain network will face not only the uncertainties in the supply chain, but also the unexpected events outside the supply chain network such as contingency, disruption, disaster and terrorism. These uncertainties and unexpected events have negative impacts on the survival and performance of a supply chain network. Robustness of supply chain networks is an important research issue as a vulnerable supply chain network may not be able to operate at all. While there has been extensive work on the measurement of supply chain performance, little of this work has focused on measuring a supply chain's robustness, that is, the ability to cope with deviation and disruption. This paper presents a system-wide approach to quantifying robustness index of supply chain networks. This approach considers both network structural robustness and network functional robustness. A hypothetical supply chain network is employed to demonstrate the proposed approach.