Supply Chain Disruptions and New Book

In the post below, I noted that I have organized an invited session, which will take place this Monday, at the Math Programming Symposium in Chicago. In the session, we have a presentation on supply chain risk management and vulnerability analysis, joint with Professor Patrick Qiang of Penn State University in Malvern, and Professor June Dong of SUNY Oswego. The paper that we are presenting on this topic will appear in a new book, out shortly, entitled Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability, which is edited by Professors Teresa Wu and Jennifer Blackhurst. If you click here, you will also find the table of contents, which includes our chapter, and the chapter by another Virtual Center for Supernetworks Associate, Professor Jose M. Cruz of UCONN at Storrs, who contributed a chapter on network relationships. We congratulate Professors Wu and Blackhurst on the completion of this volume!

Here is the preprint of our supply chain risk paper, which captures uncertainty associated with production costs, as well as distribution and transportation costs in multitiered supply chain networks, in which the individual behavior of the decision-makers is modeled, along with the prices that the consumers are willing to pay for the product in the case of random demands. In addition, we define robustness in this setting and provide a supply chain network performance measure.

An expansion of this chapter, with additional motivation and case examples, appears in our book, Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, where we also model network systems and their vulnerability from transportation networks to the Internet, electric power supply chains, and even financial networks! In addition, we demonstrate, how through network integration, one may identify a priori, any possible synergies, which can greatly assist in the evaluation of potential mergers and/or acquisitions.