Assessing supply chain dependency on critical infrastructures using fuzzy cognitive maps

For identifying critical infrastructures, the potential consequences of their loss to society must be estimated. This requires establishing consequence propagation through the complex network of CI and supply chains. This study investigates the viability of a novel method for this purpose, which exploits fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) theory to evaluate the impact of service disruption of one infrastructure on other infrastructures and on supply chains. It integrates a knowledge elicitation technique to obtain data from domain experts. A pilot study of this method determining the impact of disruptions on the fast moving consumer goods (FMCGs) supply chain obtained directly usable results. These show the importance of workforce and the relative vulnerability of this supply chain. While further development is required, the method is now regarded as an important candidate approach for ex‐ante loss estimation.