A new decision support system is proposed and developed that will help sustaining business in a high-risk business environment. The system is developed as a web application to better integrate the supply chain entities and to provide a common platform for performing risk analysis in a supply chain. The system performs a risk analysis and calculates risk factor with each activity in the supply considering its interrelationship with other activities. Bayesian networks along with fault tree structures are embedded in the system and logical rules are used to perform a qualitative fault tree analysis, as the data required to calculate the frequency of occurrence is rarely available.
The developed system guides the risk assessment process: from asset identification to consequence analysis before estimating the risk factor associated with each activity in the supply chain. The system is tested with a sample case study on a highly explosive product. Results show that the system is capable of identifying high-risk threats.
The system further needs to be developed to add a safeguard analysis module and to enable automatic data extraction from the enterprise resource planning and legacy databases. It is expected that the system on complete development and induction will help supply chain managers to manage business risks and operations more efficiently and effectively by providing a complete picture of the risk environment and safeguards required to reduce the risk level.
|