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Supply chains are prone to several operational and disruption risks. In order to design a resilient supply chain network capable of responding to such potential risks suitably, this paper proposes a novel framework for the business continuity-inspired resilient supply chain network design (BCRSCND) problem, which includes three steps. First, four resilience dimensions including Anticipation, Preparation, Robustness, and Recovery are considered to quantify the resilience score of each facility using a multi-criteria decision-making technique and considering a comprehensive set of resilience strategies. In the second step, the critical processes and their business continuity metrics (which are vital for supply chain continuity), are identified. The outputs of the first two steps provide the inputs of a novel two-stage mixed possibilistic-stochastic programing (TSMPSP) model. The model aims to design a multi-echelon, multi-product resilient supply chain network under both operational and disruption risks. The proposed TSMPSP model allows decision makers to incorporate their risk attitudes into the design process. After converting the original TSMPSP model into the crisp counterpart, several sensitivity analyses are conducted on different features of hypothetical disruptions (i.e. their severity, likelihood and location) and DM's risk attitudes from which useful managerial insights are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's competitive and turbulent environment persuades every organisation to implement a business continuity management system (BCMS) for dealing with disruptive incidents such as earthquake, flood, and terrorist attacks. Within a BCMS, effective and efficient business continuity plans (BCPs) must be provided to ensure the continuity of organisation's key products. This study develops a novel approach to select the most appropriate BCPs which can meet the business continuity key measures. First, a risk assessment process is conducted to define the disruptive incidents for which the organisation should have suitable BCPs. Then, two different possibilistic programming models including hard and soft BCP selection models are developed to determine appropriate BCPs under epistemic uncertainty of input data. These models aim to maximise the resilience level of the organisation while minimising the establishment cost of selected BCPs.‏ Finally, a real case study is provided whose results demonstrate the applicability and usefulness of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is described as a set of computerised numerical controlled machines, input–output buffers interconnected by automated material handling devices. This paper develops a bi-objective operation allocation and material handling equipment selection problem in FMS with the aim of minimising the machine operation, material handling and machine setup costs and maximising the machine utilisation. The proposed model is solved by a modified chaotic ant swarm simulation based optimisation (CAS2O) while applying pre-selection and discrete recombination operators is surveyed a capable method to simulate different experiments of FMS problems. A test problem is selected from the literature to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method to solve the FMS scheduling problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a fuzzy multi-objective linear programming (FMOLP) model for solving multi-objective mixed-model assembly line problem. In practice, vagueness and imprecision of the goals in this problem make the fuzzy decision-making complicated. The proposed model considers minimizing total utility work, total production rate variation, and total setup cost, using a two-phase linear programming approach. In the first phase, the problem is solved using a max–min approach. The max–min solution not being efficient, in general, we propose a new model in the second phase to maximize a composite satisfaction degree at least as good as the degrees obtained by phase one. To show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a numerical example is solved and the results are compared with the ones obtained by the fuzzy mixed integer goal programming and weighted additive methods. The computational results show that the proposed FMOLP model achieves lower objective functions as well as higher satisfaction degrees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]