Calculating supply chain resilience: a critical review of the literature

The ability of a system to withstand disruptive events and quickly restore operational status by recovering initial capacity is called resilience. A resilience analysis allows to consider long term effects of disruptions and track the time trend of residual capacity allowing to estimate business interruption losses. However, no standard and comprehensive methodology for resilience assessment of industrial systems is available yet. To provide guidance to researchers and practitioners, in this paper an attempt is made to develop a framework to categorize and critically appraise resilience estimation approaches for supply chains. A critical review of the literature is here carried out, to evaluate the state of the art and identify the best available approaches. In particular, in reviewing the literature we focused on five main issues, namely: adopted computational approach, resilience quantification metric, point of view of the analyst, flow modeling, transport failures modeling. Additionally, resilience estimation has been decomposed into a set of independent subproblems, namely: the characterization of the disruptive events, their probability of occurrence estimation, the generation of scenarios, the definition of the failure state for the elements of the supply chain, the calculation of the time trend of capacity recovery and the definition of the economic loss. Previous approaches in tackling each subproblems are compared and discussed. A morphological matrix is finally suggested as an operational tool to support the definition of appropriate combinations of approaches to subproblems that allow the development of new more effective models for assessing the resilience of the supply chain. The above approach marks the novelty if this critical literature review as compared to existing ones.