Improved Acquisition for System Sustainment: Resilience-Based Supplier Selection for Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul Acquisition

Abstract

The occurrence of disruptive events, whether attacks, natural disasters, accidents, or common failures, is inevitable. As such, risk-based planning across many domains has focused on resilience, or the ability to withstand and recover from such disruptions. Resilience should be an important criterion when choosing suppliers. This report describes a research effort that is framed around improving supplier selection by integrating several dimensions of supplier alternatives under uncertainty, primarily focusing on supplier resilience. This work (i) explored a set of supplier selection criteria that includes accounting for resilience measures, and (ii) developed a means to compare probability distributions with an initial application in project management risk (with an application in supplier selection still on-going). This research serves a greater public good in studying supply chains that the public relies upon for daily life, and the methodologies and insights provided in this work can be applicable to a broad range of systems whose supply chains are subject to disruption. Selecting suppliers that are more insulated to these disruptions and understanding how supply chain designs affect resilience is paramount across many applications.