Abroon Qazi, a research student jointly supervised in Economics (Dr Alex Dickson) and Management Science (Professor John Quigley) has won the Best Student Paper award for their paper entitled 'A novel application of system survival signature in supply chain risk management' that was presented at the IEEE 5th International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management (March 3-5, Dubai). The same paper was awarded a conference grant by the Research and Development Management (RADMA) to support the travel and subsistence involved in presenting the paper.
The paper presents a unique concept of capturing both the supply network configuration and risk profiles of suppliers. Once the network configuration is modelled, suppliers can be grouped together on the basis of their risk profiles. These risk profiles can be generalised to different categories of risks such as delayed shipments, quality issues, over-budgeting and so on.
Through specifying the probability distributions for the assigned groups of suppliers, system survival signature can help researchers evaluate the overall reliability of the supply network taking into account the relative impact of suppliers on the overall reliability that is a function of their position in the network and risk profile.