LAUSR

With the development of the global economy and energy supply chain, the uncertainty and complexity of the bauxite maritime supply chain (BMSC) has been further increased. Determining the crucial risks and improving the supply chain’s resilient capacity based on operation objectives has become important, in order to ensure the sustainability and competitiveness of the BMSC. This paper combines quality function deployment (QFD), a multi-criteria decision method (MCDM), and intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS); an integrated methodology is developed to achieve efficient design of BMSC resilient strategies (RESs), taking into account both customer requirements (CRs) and risk factors (RFs). A combined weighting method is employed to determine each CR’s importance. A decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method is adopted to determine the RFs’ interrelationships. The results obtained with the MCDM are incorporated into QFD to construct a two-stage house of quality (HoQ) model, which transforms CRs into RFs, and then into RESs. The real case of the Guinea–China bauxite import supply chain is studied to demonstrate the applicability and validity of the proposed framework. Research results reveal that the most important CR is ‘stability’. ‘Information sharing asymmetry’, ‘poor ship stability or obsolete equipment performance’, and ‘lack of coordination between shipping and ports’ are the most severe risks impacting the operation of supply chain. Furthermore, ‘constructing strategic alliances’ contributes to alleviating potential risks, optimizing the allocation of resources, and finally, improving the resilience of the BMSC significantly. This paper will help managers to understand how to achieve sustainable development of the supply chain through resilient strategies, and will aid rational decision-making in the management and operation of a resilient BMSC for alleviating risk.