Risk Management and the National Strategy for Global Supply Chain Security Announced

I am pleased to see that President Obama has announced a National Strategy for Global Supply Chain Security, which is a well-written document that I will share with my students in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare course since our next topics will be the differences between commercial supply chains and humanitarian ones, followed by risk management and vulnerability.

According to a recent article in Transport Topics, "DHS, State Dept. Directed to Devise Plans to Guard Against Supply-Chain Disruptions," which appeared in the January 30, 2012 edition (I have the hardcopy version), both the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department have been directed to guard against supply chain disruptions. According to the article, Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security stated at a briefing at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, recently, that: We must continue to strengthen global supply chains to ensure that they operate effectively in time of crisis, recover quickly from disruptions and facilitate international trade and travel.

Indeed, resilient supply chains are essential to our global economy.

Capturing the associated risk in global supply chains is critical to this effort and our most recent work contains a quantitative framework based on generalized networks, physics principles, risk management, and optimization to capture the complexity of a challenging global supply chain --- the medical nuclear one.

Our paper, "Securing the Sustainability of Global Medical Nuclear Supply Chains Through Economic Cost Recovery, Risk Management, and Optimization," Anna Nagurney, Ladimer S. Nagurney, and Dong Li, can be downloaded from the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website. In it, we model the time-decay of radioisotopes used in medical diagnostic procedures, and also the risk associated with such highly perishable and hazardous, critical products.

This is the second study that we have produced on medical nuclear supply chains.

Our first,"Medical Nuclear Supply Chain Design: A Tractable Network Model and Computational Approach," Anna Nagurney and Ladimer S. Nagurney, focused on the design of such supply chain networks, whereas our most recent one focuses on optimizing the operations and also considers the transition from highly enriched uranium targets to low enriched ones.

We co-authored an Op-Ed on this medical nuclear supply chain topic, Viewpoint: Passage of American Medical Isotope Production Act of 2011 will help ensure U.S. nuclear medicine supply chain, that appeared in the Sunday Republican - July 10, 2011.