New Research Grant for Prof. Ralf Seifert and René Glogg

Supply chains and transport networks play a crucial role for the global economy. As supply chains have become more complex and more focused on efficiency, an increased vulnerability towards external disturbances has been observed. In order to design resilient supply chains, it is first necessary to understand the effect of disruptions on such chains. In our research we model a disruption as a low-probability, high-impact event which will stop the operation of some part of the supply chain for a consequential amount of time. We model the supply chains themselves as production networks in order to exploit the broad scientific literature available on networks. We introduce the disruptions into the models through the use of chance constraints and then reinterpret them as perturbations on the capacity of network arcs. This allows us to apply insights from parametric optimization on networks to the problem.