No abstract

Pandemic-induced lockdowns, restrictions on commercial activities, and natural disasters can disrupt a supply chain for prolonged time periods. These disruptions significantly impact the consumer demands, which in turn affect the capacity and profitability of a supply chain network. Economic survivability is the ability to maintain a net positive economic worth, or at least keeping it above a certain threshold, in the presence of sudden and prolonged disruptions that drastically reduce the product demands, prices, resource availability or others. We address the economic survivability of geographically distributed interconnected networks under demand disruptions. We formulate and incorporate the necessary conditions for ensuring economic survivability in supply chain design. The overall problem is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP). Increasing the economic survivability in general also increases the return-on-investment (ROI) and profitability. However, for multi-regional, distributed and interdependent supply chains, a more balanced distribution of investment portfolio is important to improve the local survivability of each region, but it comes at the expense of overall or global profitability.We also observe that the economic survivability is negatively impacted by over-designing a supply chain to meet excess demands (typically from spot markets). Decision-makers should balance the trade-offs between survivability and excess demand satisfaction by thoroughly assessing the probability of positive and negative demand fluctuations.

No abstract

No abstract

The effects of natural disasters, pandemic‐induced lockdowns, and other disruptions often cascade across networks. In this work, we use minimum cost of resilience (MCOR) and operation‐based resilience metrics to quantify network performance against single‐connectivity failures and identify critical connections in interconnected networks. MCOR corresponds to the minimum additional infrastructure investment that is required to achieve a certain level of resilience. To guarantee MCOR, we incorporate the metrics in a multi‐scenario mixed‐integer linear program (MILP) that accounts for resilience in the design phase of interconnected networks. The goal is to obtain optimal generation and transportation capacities with flexible operation under all single‐connectivity disruption scenarios. We demonstrate the applicability of our resilience‐aware framework on a water‐energy nexus (WEN) example focusing on grass‐root design and retrofitting. We further apply the framework to analyze a regional WEN and observe that it is possible to achieve “full” resilience in the expense of additional regional investments.