Resilience of logistics network: analysis and design

Abstract

Logistics entities are interrelated to each other, any disruption or sudden unavailability of the entities may cause severe cascading disruption effects on the functioning of the entire logistics network. In analyze the cascading disruption effects, it is important to actively concern the normal logistics practices, rather than passively emphasize on learning from the past incidents. This paper proposes a resilience analysis framework for the analysis and design of logistics network on how to help the network to cope with complexity under disruption. Under the resilience analysis framework, the logistics network is modeled as a probabilistic network graph, the resilience can then be analyzed by the reliability of all the independent connection paths among the logistics entities with connection weightings. The design of the logistics network is then further proposed by (1) risk sharing and resilience enhancement by means of the redundancy effect, and (2) restoration and recovery of the network by means of dependency routing. Therefore, this paper can provide an efficient way to analyze and design the stability of the logistics network as well as to understand the ability of the network to return to a stable state after disruptions from failure.