Agile construction supply chains for disaster resilience: a theoretical review

Resilience is a critical facet for effective disaster recovery that could potentially ease the lasting impact that disasters leave on individuals, communities, and economies of impacted regions. It is not possible for governments to precisely predict the scale and nature of the events they will have to manage, however, states and communities can develop resilience to cope with disaster, and subsequent reconstruction process. It is argued that supply chain contextualisation can assist in analysing post disaster reconstruction environment and process, from the construction industry perceptive, to understand the complex interplay of number of variables impacting reconstruction. Understanding of issues associated post disaster reconstruction supply chain can lead to improved resilience. Identifying weak connections between supply chain organisations while improving the agility of supply chains can assist in resilience enhancement. This paper proposes four key aspects dominating post disaster supply chain design and operation namely: political, economical, legal and cultural environment, density of proposed infrastructure typology, stakeholders of the reconstruction process and context specific issues arising from the previous three aspects. It is suggested that resilience can be achieved through creating agility in the legislative process, labolir/skill supply sector and material/resource supply sector