Ensuring supply for emergency services – modelling supply chains with incomplete sets of data

To ensure material availability for public health and safety services, supply chain simulation could be used to identify the risk of bottlenecks due to disruptions in global supply chains. However, these stakeholders do not have the detailed knowledge about their supply chains required for reliable simulation results. A new approach is presented in this article, which enables the modeling of a supply chain without full knowledge about each process node. It consists of generic data containers, each representing typical nodes within a supply chain with plausible process parameters, boundaries, and distributed values. We present the conceptual feasibility of the approach through a case study and demonstrate the methodology for modelling a supply chain for detailed bottleneck analysis and automated risk assessment of a public health and safety supply chain