Research on supply network resilience considering random and targeted disruptions simultaneously

Abstract

Supply networks (SN) must maintain operations and connectedness under disruptions to remain competitive; this is referred to as SN resilience. Building a resilient SN is an underlying challenge in supply chain management. In this paper, SN resilience is examined from the complex network topology perspective to understand how supply chain managers construct resilient networks. The proposed growth model considers enterprises leaving the network, which previous studies have ignored. Considering the heterogeneous roles of enterprises, new metrics based on a new proposed sub-network concept are presented to evaluate resilience. Using a computer simulation, the resilience of the SN generated by the model proposed in this paper is compared with that of other models, and the results indicate that (i) the proposed model can be tuned to generate a desired resilient network; (ii) the proposed metrics capture the resilience requirements of the SN very well; (iii) the more uniform the distribution of the enterprises, the more resilient the corresponding SN; and (iv) the higher the values of α and β, the lower the SN resilience, and β affects the resilience more than α does.