Mitigation of Supply Chain Disruptions by Criminal Agents

Since the outbreak of COVID, the role of supply chains has been brought front and center in many aspects of our daily lives. For example, the disruption to supply chains can significantly influence the operation of the world economy and this has been shown to permeate and affect a large majority of countries and their citizens. However, it is not just diseases outbreaks that can affect them, but also criminal agents. To this end at the 15th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (or SBP-BRiMs for short), Abhisekh Rana, Hamdi Kavak, Sean Luke, Carlotta Domeniconi,  Jim Jones and myself have a paper entitled "Mitigation of Optimized Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Disruptions by Criminal Agents."

The paper presents some initial results from a model that explores the disruptions to supply chains by a criminal agent and possible mitigation strategies. We construct a model of a typical pharmaceutical manufacturing supply chain, which is implemented via discrete event simulation. The criminal agent optimizes its resource allocation using a CMA-ES algorithm to maximize disruption to the supply chain. CMA-ES is part of a family of sample-based optimization techniques collectively known as evolutionary algorithms.  Broadly speaking, CMA-ES starts with a sample of random candidate solutions to optimize.  It then iteratively assesses the quality of each candidate solution, then performs resampling based on their quality to produce a new sample of candidates. By combining our supply chain model with our criminal agent, and by leveraging CMA-ES, we attempt to identify the main bottlenecks and the most vulnerable points in the pharmaceutical supply chain. Our findings show criminal agents can cause cascading damage and exploit vulnerabilities, which inherently exist within the supply chain itself. We also demonstrate how basic mitigation strategies can efficaciously alleviate this potential damage.  If this sounds of interest, below we provide the abstract to the paper, along with some of the key figures and at the bottom of the post the full reference and a link to the paper.

Abstract: 

Disruption to supply chains can significantly influence the operation of the world economy and this has been shown to permeate and affect a large majority of countries and their citizens. We present initial results from a model that explores the disruptions to supply chains by a criminal agent and possible mitigation strategies. We construct a model of a typical pharmaceutical manufacturing supply chain, which is implemented via discrete event simulation. The criminal agent optimizes its resource allocation to maximize disruption to the supply chain. Our findings show criminal agents can cause cascading damage and exploit vulnerabilities, which inherently exist within the supply chain itself. We also demonstrate how basic mitigation strategies can efficaciously alleviate this potential damage. 

Keywords: Pharmaceutical supply chains, Criminal agents, Evolutionary computation, Mitigation.

A simplified version of a typical pharmaceutical supply chain.

Design of the criminal agent.

Sample simulations for the baseline model, without any disruption, and attacks at the five main disruption points in the supply chain.

Summary statistics and sample simulations for CMAES optimized disruptions with and without mitigation in place.

Full Reference:

Rana, R., Kavak, H., Crooks, A.T., Domeniconi, C., Luke, S. and Jones, J. (2022), Mitigation of Optimized Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Disruptions by Criminal Agents, in Thomson, R., Dancy, C. and Pyke, P. (eds), Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, Pittsburgh, PA., pp 13-23. (pdf)