Exploring the impact of disruptions on supply chains

A supply chain is a system of organizations, processes, information, people and resources involved in producing and delivering a product or service to a customer. Contemporary supply chains have numerous customers and suppliers that span across multiple countries. Hence, supply chains are highly susceptible to disruptions in supply or demand, either natural or manmade. Examples of disruptions include pandemics, natural disasters (e.g. earthquakes and hurricanes), logistical failures (e.g. port congestion, rebel assaults on commercial ships and cyberattacks), geopolitical conflicts, labor strikes, recession, price changes, manufacturing failures, and unexpected demand. Although companies mitigate their supply chain risks via various initiatives, no supply chain is entirely immune to disruptions. Therefore, companies aim to improve their supply chain resilience, which involves enhancing their ability to respond to unexpected disruptions quickly. This project aims to explore how supply chains respond to disruptions and how they might be made more resilient. Besides being motivated by real-world supply chains, this project is also inspired by a data challenge released during the IFAC MIM 2025 conference (https://supplychaindatahub.org/mim25_data_challenge/network-25/).

The students will be required to do a literature survey and find innovative ways to determine the most "critical" and "vulnerable" organizations in a real-world supply chain by using the data set provided by the IFAC MIM 2025 data challenge. The "critical" organizations are those whose disruption would have the most significant impact on the overall supply chain. The "vulnerable" organizations are those that are most likely to be disrupted. The dataset provided by the data challenge represents the topological structure of a large and complex supply chain, which includes more than 7,200 organizations (i.e. firms or legal business entities). For each organization (i.e. node), if available, the country as well as the product(s) provided to the supply chain are given. We are also given the data on which organization provides to which other organization (supply relationship between two firms) as a list of approximately 44,000 edges. Students can utilise a wide range of tools and methods when exploring supply network analysis.