Albert Munoz

On the quantification of operational supply chain resilience

Operational disruptions impact a supply chain’s ability to match supply and demand. To remain competitive, supply chains need to be resilient and thus capable of rapidly and effectively recovering from operational disruptions. Supply chain resilience is inherently multidimensional, as it spans across multiple tiers, and thus is difficult to quantify. Extant research has measured the transient response through a single-dimension or single-organisation as a proxy for operational resilience. Whilst this greatly simplifies the analysis, it is also potentially misleading, as an erroneous selection of metric(s) may lead to an inaccurate evaluation of the transient response. This research extends the understanding of operational resilience via quantitative evaluation of multiple transient response measures across multiple tiers; the objective being to construct a multidimensional, multi-echelon operational supply chain resilience metric. The study utilises disruptions as experimental inputs for a serial supply chain simulation model; results are obtained for individual measurements of the transient response across multiple supply chain tiers. Analysis indicates that individual dimensions of resilience can adequately explain the transient response at the single-firm level, whilst aggregation of multiple resilience dimensions across multiple tiers has greater capacity to holistically capture the performance response to supply chain disruptions.

The bullwhip effect in complex supply chains

This paper reviews the various methods of modelling the dynamics of supply chains. We then present recently documented causes of the Bullwhip effect in production supply chains, and the methodologies used to describe and measure the importance of these causes. We examine the limitations of these methodologies and suggest a combined approach discrete event-continuous simulation modelling approach to further study this phenomenon in complex production supply chains.

System Configuration Contributions to Vulnerability: Applications to Connected Personal Devices

There is a strong impetus to commercialize emerging technology, tempered by safety expectations and regulatory compliance requirements [1]. Such is the case for medical implant devices, where successful operation of devices can be life-saving, but while consequences of failure are severe. Recent advances in this technology aimed at enabling remote access to a device facilitate remote and more accurate monitoring of patient health. In doing so, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) both satisfy market pressures and potentially introduce new avenues of risk that increase end-user vulnerability [2]. Vulnerability contributed by technological systems is known to researchers [3]-[5] as an important consideration in individual vulnerability. This study aims to quantify the contribution of technological configuration to end-user vulnerability, specifically the additional risk of Internet-enabled medical implant devices.