Nature-inspired design principles promote supply network resilience

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The dynamic, interconnected nature of modern supply chains makes it important to understand how firm-level decision-making will impact the robustness of supply chains to disruption. The behavior of naturally evolved distribution systems offers a useful starting point to identify potential design features that can promote robustness without compromising the viability of individual firms. Drawing inspiration from how ant food-sharing networks respond to supply shortages, we developed an agent-based model of a generalized supply network and evaluated how different local strategies influenced the ability of firms to acquire sufficient resources to meet their demand. Our simulations reveal that differences among firms in strategic behavior can reduce variation in outcomes across firms while maintaining mean performance, thereby buffering system-level robustness. In addition, the ability to expand one’s supplier network bolstered performance when firms experienced difficulty in meeting their demand. Conversely, under the assumptions of our model, overly relying on distributors to gain access to additional suppliers or to gain competitive advantages was ineffective in helping firms to meet their consumptive demand. Our nature-inspired modeling framework provides a potentially useful approach for evaluating how different participant decision-making strategies may impact the robustness and resilience of global supply chains that are increasingly likely to face frequent and unpredictable disruptions.