Design of Supply Chains under the Risk of Facility Disruptions

Abstract The design of efficient supply chains is a major challenge for companies in the process industry. Supply chain performance is subject to different sources of uncertainty including reliability of the facilities. Facility disruptions are among the most critical events that supply chains can experience. In order to reduce the undesirable effects of disruptions, these events must be anticipated at the design phase of the supply chain. This work addresses the design of supply chains under the risk of facility disruptions by simultaneously considering decisions on the facility location and the inventory management. The proposed formulation is based on a two-stage stochastic programming framework where the scenarios are determined by the possible combinations of facility disruptions. The first stage decisions include the location of distribution centers and their storage capacity. The second stage decisions involve assigning customer demands to the distribution centers that are available in every scenario. The objective is to minimize the sum of investment cost and the expected cost of distribution during a finite time horizon. The formulation is implemented and compared with the optimal solution of the deterministic design problem though an illustrative example. The results show that the proposed formulation generates supply chain designs with the capability to adjust to adverse scenarios. This flexibility translates into significant savings when disruptions occur in the operation of supply chains.