A simulation-based framework to improve the resilience of the food supply chains

This thesis reports on the research undertaken to aid food manufacturing companies to enhance their capabilities in order to mitigate successfully various supply chain Unanticipated Disruptions (UD), in particular those caused by climate change, and to improve their overall supply chain resilience. The aim of this research is to investigate the future requirements of the food manufacturing companies, identify, and address the gaps on their capabilities in mitigating major environmental and climate change disruptions, and to develop novel methods and tools to enhance these capabilities.

The research is presented in three complimentary sections. The first section includes an extensive overview of the global food systems to outline their current vulnerabilities. Second part of the literature review focuses on recent research on supply chain resilience and disruptions. Furthermore, a review of Industry 4.0 and its related technologies as well as how these nowadays influence the food supply chain is presented. The second section introduces a novel framework, namely Resilient Food Supply Chain (RFSC), which consists of three stages. The first stage develops a bespoke map of the Food Supply Chain (FSC) under consideration, while the impact of various UDs on this FSC will be assessed in the second stage of the RFSC. In the third and final stage of the framework a bespoke simulation model is used to aid with assessing the overall impacts of a specific UD, and then for generating a suitable recovery plan to mitigate these impacts. The third section comprises of a distinct industrial case study, which is used to demonstrate the RFSC framework applicability and to draw the final conclusions from this research.

In summary, the results from this research have shown that the proposed RFSC framework can be effectively utilised by food manufacturing companies to enhance their overall supply chain resilience and successfully mitigate the impact from various unanticipated disruptions. Moreover, the bespoke simulation model developed by this research supports the future applications of modern digital technologies to improve food supply chain productivity and resilience.