Abstract for: Increasing Resilience of Supply Networks to Climate Change Induced Disruptions

A model is constructed to investigate the response of a supply network to disruptions due to extreme weather events, such as the 2011 flooding in Thailand that affected hard disk drive production. The supply network simplifies the complex networks seen in the real world to consist of just three business categories: manufacturers, suppliers that provide a key component to the manufacturers and retailers who sell the finished product. The suppliers, manufacturers and retailers collectively employ the same two-part mathematical rule, based on their own current inventory’s level and on the recent rate of shipping to the next business category downstream, to determine how much of the good in their own inventory to manufacture/procure. Though the model is simple, some of the behaviour is non-intuitive, including non-monotonic recovery from a severe disruption and a case seen where the time to recovery (TTR) of the manufacturer’s inventory is faster when all of its production capacity is destroyed than when a portion of the production capacity is retained. We believe this model is generic enough to serve as a basis for testing the effect of climate change scenarios on measures that can improve the resilience of supply networks.