Agent-based Simulation for Improving Resilience of Supply Chains: a Guide to Manage Uncertainty in Supply Chains

The complexity and the extended reach of today¿s supply chain networks expose businesses to a huge range of unexpected disruptions. This calls for building resilience in supply chains, which is not just recovery from the mishaps, but is a proactive, structured and integrated exploration of capabilities within the supply chain to resist and win against unforeseen happenings. Literature on supply chain and organisational resilience are informative in identifying resilience enhancing strategies and capabilities, but a detailed dynamic analysis of behaviour of the supply chain to understand the suitability of different resilience capabilities over time and under different scenarios is not carried out. The book addresses this gap by studying the impact of adopting several resilience improvement strategies and different behavioural rules by different agents on supply chain performance over time. An important contribution of this book is to produce a framework to test the appropriateness of different resilience enhancement procedures.