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. Read more...