risk assessment of municipal drinking water using interpretive-structural modeling approach

 Due to the complexity and uncertainty of supply chain factors in organizations that are involved with a wide range of internal and external factors. Any action to reduce or eliminate a risk can lead to a reduction or increase in other risks. These complexities and high levels of uncertainty are due to disruptions, challenges and threats in the supply chain. Therefore, having a general idea of supply chain risks and the relationships between them can lead to a more effective and comprehensive strategy in reducing, changing or eliminating risks. The purpose of this study is to identify risk factors and show the structure of potential risk relationships of drinking water supply chain in a sample municipal water and wastewater company, with an interpretive structural modeling (ISM) approach.

Based on the Delphi method, and studying the other researches, main risks of the drinking water supply chain was identified. Then, with the ISM approach, 12 experts with at least 15 years of experience in technical and managerial fields in different categories were asked to complete the questionnaires based on conduction intensity and risks dependence.

Considering the content validity of water supply chain risk and determining the final risks, the structure of the relationships between modeling risks was extracted and pairwise comparison relationships between risks are obtained after collecting the opinions of experts.

The results showed that supply chain risks such as natural phenomena risks, financial credit, customers, social and communications, are at lower levels of the model and have the greatest impact on other risks and are the cause of change or the escalation of higher-level risks such as resource risks, strategy, organizational culture, politics, processes and operations