EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

2066. Inventory prepositioning as a resilience strategy under disruption

Invited abstract in session WC-55: Strategic Facility Location and Inventory Prepositioning, stream Humanitarian Operations.

Wednesday, 12:30-14:00
Room: Liberty 1.09

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Alican Yilmaz
Industrial Engineering, Northeastern University
2. Ozlem Ergun
Northeastern University

Abstract

The resilience of supply chain networks has become increasingly critical due to rising disruptions from natural disasters, trade conflicts, and terrorist activities. The severity of these disruptions highlights the need for effective resilience measures. In this study, we propose a tri-level defender-attacker-defender (DAD) model to enhance supply chain resilience through inventory prepositioning.

The DAD problem is known for its high computational complexity, with exact algorithms in the literature often facing significant scalability challenges as problem sizes increase. To mitigate this issue, we adopt a network science based approach to identify candidate critical components, thereby reducing problem size and computational overhead. Specifically, we introduce a novel node criticality measure based on betweenness centrality to identify high-impact disruption targets. This measure is evaluated across various supply chain network configurations to assess its effectiveness. Next, we integrate this criticality information into the Column-and-Constraint Generation (C&CG) framework, reducing the number of iterations required for global optimality and thereby improving the runtime performance. Finally, we validate the proposed measure through a case study on the Alaska fuel supply chain network, offering insights into its effectiveness and identifying scenarios where it may be less effective.

Keywords

Status: accepted

Back to the list of papers