3 Presentations

• 
  01:30 PM - 01:55 PM

  Resilient Agri-food supply chains, An approach to food security.

  • Pedram Bagheri, presenter, University of Manitoba
  • Yuvraj Gajpal, University of Manitoba
  • Srimantoorao Appadoo, University of Manitoba

  The ability of a supply network to identify, react to, and recover from unavoidable disruptive events such as Covid-19, wildfires, earthquakes, etc. makes it a resilient network. Resilient networks can help mitigate food insecurity that exists in the form of uneven distribution of abundant resources in industrial countries such as Canada. Through these resilient networks, food that is already produced to meet the demand levels can find its way to the tables of the people who need it most in remote areas such as the Northwest Territories. In this paper, we went over the link between resilience and food security and explored the ways different supply networks affect the resilience of agri-food supply chains.
• 
  01:55 PM - 02:20 PM

  Government Policies to Incentivize Citizen Preparedness for Supply Disruptions

  • Xiaoyan Zhao, City University of Hong Kong
  • Venus Lo, presenter, City University of Hong Kong
  • Stephen Shum, City University of Hong Kong

  Supply disruptions due to emergencies are often accompanied by shortages of daily necessities. Governments attempt to promote the importance of emergency preparation, such as storing bottled water at home, so that citizens have basic necessities while waiting for aid. We study a government’s problem of providing financial incentives to ensure that citizens hold supply as part of emergency preparation. We consider a system of citizens, a retailer, and a government. The government can implement a citizens-based incentive via a discount or coupon to reduce their cost of holding spare supply. Alternatively, the government can implement a retailer-based incentive by subsidizing the retailer’s capacity during regular times so that citizens can easily acquire spare supply in advance. We show that these incentives are effective under different circumstances, and depend on factors such as the government’s budget, the citizens’ sensitivity to the risk, and the retailer’s profit margin. Hence, we study a hybrid policy which combines the strengths of these incentives. Since the problem of finding an optimal hybrid policy is intractable, we construct an approximation algorithm with good theoretical and practical performance. Numerical experiments show that the hybrid policy can reduce social loss significantly compared to applying a single policy.
• 
  02:20 PM - 02:45 PM

  Tackling Random Disruption for Railroad Companies through a Competitor Infrastructure

  • Seyyed Hossein Alavi, presenter, DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University
  • Verma Manish, McMaster University

  Our game theoretical model utilizes competitor infrastructure to reduce the cost of random disruption and considers four strategies: repair, re-routing, third-party services, and renting the capacity of another railroad company. The pricing of rented railcars is determined by the competitor, which can affect the effectiveness of the renting strategy. A real case study in the United States is presented to analyze the practical implementation of the proposed strategies. The study suggests that the proposed model can help optimize railroad operations and improve customer satisfaction by reducing the impact of random disruption on their services. The findings of the study provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of different strategies to tackle random disruption, which can benefit railroad companies in reducing costs and enhancing their services.