INTER-DEPENDENCY BETWEEN CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE AND SUPPLY CHAIN NETWORK: A MODEL BASED SYSTEMS ENGINEERING APPROACH

摘要

This paper is a work in progress in an effort to model the effects of a natural or man-made disaster on supply chain network (SCN) infrastructure. When faced with extensive disruptions of the supporting infrastructure, from transportation routes to utility systems, the delays to a SCN after a disaster can be widespread and costly. The Systems Modeling Language (SysML) is an approach to document the functionality, performance, and interfacing of systems that lays a foundation for a model-based systems engineering (MBSE) approach. In an effort to improve understanding of this complex system and to raise awareness of the impacts to a SCN when the infrastructure fails, a system model integrating both the transportation and utility infrastructure that supports a SCN needs to be built. The infrastructure utilities are inter-dependent and aid in the functioning of the SCN elements. Using a SysML representation improves understanding of the system by looking at the inter-dependencies among the utilities and SCN, and aids in determining how the whole system is affected by a single outage. This improved understanding will help create a model based analysis of system configurations, leading to designs that have reduced downtime of the infrastructure and decreased profit-losses within a SCN due to infrastructure failures.