Enterprise Modeling Framework for Counterfeit Parts in Defense Systems

Increasingly, there is concern about the problem and potential consequences of counterfeit parts in the defense supply chain and defense systems. Counterfeit parts have different performance and failure characteristics than genuine parts and can result in degraded system availability, reliability and performance in the field, not to mention critical safety issues. Thus, there is an imperative to understand counterfeiting and potential ways to prevent or contain it. Today's systems are composed of multitudes of constituents – major sub-systems, which in turn consist of sub-systems, which consist of components, and so on. Likewise, the supply chain consists of multiple tiers of suppliers who provide the constituents. This is a complex environment in which to address the counterfeit parts problem. In addition, counterfeiters can potentially adapt to and overcome anti-counterfeiting measures, and non-counterfeiting actors may adapt to such measures in unanticipated ways, causing secondary effects. This paper presents an enterprise modeling framework for studying the problem. This framework consists of five interacting elements – the exogenous environment, policy, enterprise actors, supply chain flows, and system/constituent behavior and performance. A prototype agent-based simulation model implementing this framework is also presented. The goal is to use such models to determine effective anti-counterfeiting policies.