Fuel Panics - insights from spatial agent-based simulation

Eben Upton and William Nuttall

Cambridge Working Papers in Economics from Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge

Abstract: The United Kingdom has twice suffered major disruption as a result of fuel panics first in September 2000 coincident with a wave of fuel protests and more recently in March 2012 following politcal warnings of possible future supply chain disruption. In each case the disruption and economic consequences were serious. Fuel distribution is an example of a supply chain. Approaches to supply-chain planning based on linear programming are poorly suited to modelling non-equilibrium effects, while coarse-grained system dynamics models often fail to capture local phenomena which contribute to the evolution of global demand. In this Paper, we demonstrate that agent-based techniques offer a powerful framework for cosimulation of supply chains and consumers under conditions of transient demand. In the case of fuel panic crisis, we show that even a highly abstract model can reproduce a range of transient phenomena seen in the real world, and present a set of practical recommendations for policymakers faced with panic-buying.

Keywords: Fuel Panics; Agent Based Simulation; Supply Chain (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C15 C63 H30 J48 L91 R40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-04-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp and nep-ene
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/pub ... pe-pdfs/cwpe1309.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Fuel Panics: insights from spatial agent-based simulation (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cam:camdae:1309

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cambridge Working Papers in Economics from Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jake Dyer ().