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DARPA has announced its selection of teams to develop new tools and analytics capable of helping the US Department of Defense and its commercial partners improve systemic resilience in various supply-and-demand networks.
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According to DARPA’s Resilient Supply-and-Demand Networks (RSDN) program manager, Dr Mark Flood, profit motives have made modern supply chains efficient yet fragile.
As a result, DARPA’s program will look at the risk and the resilience of supply-and-demand networks rather than efficiency. It will also focus on problems that emerge at the system scale rather than localised vulnerabilities.
These networks encompass open, complex, and evolving systems of miners, designers, manufacturers, marketers, shippers, lawyers, insurers, etc.
Network dynamics reflect the impact of both external factors (e.g. conflict, climate change) and internal behaviours (e.g. inventory management) – creating the potential for unwanted surprises that can adversely affect access to national security resources.
The following program performers will concentrate their research and prototyping efforts on three diverse use cases – including metals for military applications, especially copper, military food and sustenance, and pharmaceuticals.
- Accenture Federal Services and Two Six Technologies will procure commercial data and integrate it with relevant government data to represent supply-and-demand networks.
- Stealth Software Technologies, the University of Oklahoma, and Uncharted Software will develop an extensible set of analytical tools to instrument supply-and-demand networks to describe and explore their fragilities (threats and vulnerabilities).
- Raytheon BBN will develop a first-of-its-kind modelling and simulation tool that uses historical and behavioural survey data to predict the impact of and develop mitigations to shocks to supply demand networks.
Flood explained, “We will identify issues at the point of procurement and acquisition rather than logistics and delivery. It is at the early phases of the lifecycle when the risks and uncertainties are greatest, and where the most improvement is possible.”
Research teams will take a page from financial regulators’ playbook by using an approach known as stress testing, i.e. a simulation technique used to test the resilience of institutions against possible future financial situations.
“In finance, stress testing has emerged as a central approach to addressing radical uncertainty in that system, or the possibility of transformative events for which there is no useful precedent,” Flood explained.
Some examples of such events include the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine.
Flood added, “Stress testing exploits the fact that, while it may be difficult or impossible to predict shock events, it is usually possible to estimate system response, conditional on a specific event.”
Stress testing addresses the challenge that there is only one history but many possible futures, says Flood. Therefore, the design of stress scenarios is critical.
