Application Background: Food Defense - Detailed Topological Mapping of Food Supply Chains

• Goal /Aspiration for Project
• Develop the analytical capability to deterministically/stochastically map food production and distribution supply chains for the purpose of supporting food defense and food safety risk assessments by improving the ability to:
• Identify and prioritize vulnerabilities
• Identify actions that will reduce those vulnerabilities
• Respond to and reduce the consequences of food-pathogen incidents or attacks
• Improve the speed and reliability for tracing food pathogens as part of crisis response
• Approach/Methods/Models
• System-scale adversarial risk-assessment methodology, both iterative and dynamic
• The CASoS Loki toolkit is being used to build a stochastic network representation. With this software tool, we will be able to explicitly incorporate, express, and visualize the uncertainties by producing probabilistic maps of the possible ways in which tainted food  moves through its distribution network to the consumer
• Map as completely as possible a single food marketing sector chosen from a short list of sectors we have previously identified as being particularly vulnerable to being appropriated as means for conducting a directed chem/bio attack
• Explicitly incorporate, express, and visualize uncertainties by producing probabilistic maps of network topologies
• Information gathering via:
• Literature search and interviews with food industry professionals
• Analysis of food, transportation, economic, and business databases. In order to gain access to the data required to carry out this unprecedented mapping exercise, we will make extensive use of the close working relationships we have cultivated over the past several years with food distribution network experts/owners.
• Case studies of contamination events
• Status, Accomplishments and Next Steps
• Case study of the Edible Seed Sprout distribution system has been used as basis of computational model
• Achieve wide acceptance and utilization of the risk assessment capability
• Work through our collaborators in business and in the federal and state agencies
• Make the business case for adoption
• There are several scales of implementation to pursue
• Commodity mapping (this is the current approach)
• Supply chain mapping at the firm level
• Mapping of commodity flows into, out of, and within a geographic region (The State of New Mexico has shown some interest
• CASoS Goals: General Capabilities
• Develop methodology for creating stochastic networks and perform analyses using them
• CASoS Goals: Other Potential Applications
• Other supply chain based risk analyses
• Acknowledgements
• Building on capabilities and knowledge developed across the past four years, this work was initiated with funding from Sandia National Laboratories' Laboratory Directed Research and Development program and continued with funding from the Department of Homeland Security through the NISAC program.
• We work closely the reinsurance broker Aon Corporation, whose clients include a wide variety of companies representing all sectors of the food system, from raw input suppliers to food processors to wholesale distributors to retailers and restaurants. Sandia National Laboratories is currently in the process of establishing an umbrella CRADA with Aon.
• We also have established a strong working relationship with the National Center for Food Protection & Defense (NCFPD), a DHS Center of Excellence located at the University of Minnesota. A Memorandum of Understanding has been agreed upon. NCFPD formally collaborates with a variety of major food corporations.