Assessment of Supply Chain Reliability Based on the Monte-Carlo Method

Abstract

The overwhelming majority of entities engaged in foreign economic activity in goods delivery are guided by such basic criteria for assessing customs and logistics service effectiveness as time, cost, quality and reliability. The issue of determining delivery reliability remains insufficiently studied since this process takes into account some technical, technological and organizational aspects that are difficult to predict since they are random and individual in nature.

To ensure delivery reliability when organizing international transportation, we propose to form the structure of the supply chain with the involvement of transport market entities capable of providing all the necessary types of work and services. At the same time, as the analysis of the experience of leading logistics enterprises shows, a decrease in the number of links in the supply chain results in the optimized management of material, information and financial flows in goods delivery. Therefore, we believe it to be expedient to use enterprises capable of providing integrated customs and logistics services to entities engaged in foreign economic activity.

Significant delays that affect the time and reliability of goods delivery are mainly associated with the completion of customs formalities, therefore, we suggest considering the process of customs and logistics service provision using a freight customs complex.

This infrastructure facility provides for servicing entities engaged in foreign economic activity in export, import, integrated customs and logistics services as well as customs and temporary customs warehousing. Based on the Monte-Carlo method, we assess the reliability of the provision of all the above types of services at a freight customs complex building a probabilistic analogue of the system and obtaining various variants of the random-process realization processed using the methods of mathematical statistics.

At the same time, the influence of random factors in the modelling process is taken into account by means of introducing the elements of randomness by performing playouts. As an element of randomness, we use a pseudo-random number generator employed to simulate random processes. We define and compare the reliability of various logistic chain types used for goods delivery along three international routes.