A simulation-based approach for reconstructing a diverse set of supply chain models with sparse data using a quality diversity algorithm

Abstract

Data on supply chains is often sparse due to reluctance among actors to share their data, making supply chain simulation modeling difficult. As a result, supply chain simulation models suffer from parametric and structural uncertainties, and there is a large variety of plausible simulation models that would align with the sparse observations about the real-world supply chain. Constructing a diverse set of models that fit sparse data is not an easy task. A relatively unknown approach to generating this diverse set of plausible models is the Quality Diversity (QD) algorithm. This study evaluates the feasibility of using QD to generate a diverse ensemble of supply chain simulation models for a varying degree of data sparseness. The results show that QD is able to generate a diverse ensemble of supply chain models, including the ground truth. As expected, QD successfully identifies the structure of the ground truth most frequently for a low level of data sparseness. When the sparseness of the data increases, QD is prone to overfitting, identifying supply chain structures that are more complex than the ground truth. Further research should focus on reviewing the calibration metric for sparse data, to reduce the overfitting of complex network structures.