Assessing Supply Chain Responsiveness, Resilience and Robustness (Triple-R) by Computer Simulation: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Ever more interconnected and complex supply chains increase the risk of disruptions and their propagation. Companies need to simultaneously develop capabilities such as responsiveness, resilience, and robustness (Triple-R) to hedge against these risks, while staying competitive. This requires careful investment decisions on which portfolio of Triple-R strategies to create. Being a dynamic, transient phenomena, analytical tools are often not feasible to quantify effects. Computer simulation provides an important alternative, which led to a surge of literature in recent years. This study conducted a systematic literature review of studies that use computer simulation for assessing Triple-R capabilities. Based on a final sample of 174 full articles, we found that classical means to create Triple-R capabilities have been widely assessed for a broad set of different disruption characteristics, including type of disruption and type of propagation. But, while there exists a broad literature that focusses on engineering resilience and adaptation, more research is needed that focusses on resilience as transformation. Recent disruptions are social-ecological disruptions that require new mitigation strategies. To appropriately design and assess these strategies, which need to consider societal impacts towards Industry 5.0, hybrid simulations, online simulations, and physical simulations are required that can model social-ecological aspects and contexts.