Enhancing Resilience: Model-based Simulations

Abstract: Since several years, the fragility of global supply chains (GSCs) is at historically high levels. In the same time, the landscape of hybrid threats is expanding; new forms of hybrid threats create different types of uncertainties. This paper aims to understand the potential consequences of uncertain events - like natural disasters, pandemics, hybrid and/or military aggression - on GSC resilience and robustness. Leveraging a parsimonious supply chain model, we analyse how the organisational structure of GSCs interacts with uncertainty, and how risk-aversion vs. ambiguity-aversion, vertical integration vs. upstream outsourcing, resilience vs. efficiency trade-offs drive a wedge between decentralised and centralised optimal GSC diversification strategies in presence of externalities. Parameterising the scalable data model with World-Input Output Tables, we simulate the survival probability of a GSC and implications for supply chain robustness and resilience. The presented model-based simulations provide an interoperable and directly comparable conceptualisation of positive and normative effects of counterfactual resilience and robustness policy choices under individually optimal (decentralised) and socially optimal (centralised) GSC organisation structures.