Resilience Assessment in Complex Supply Networks

Abstract

Resilience has been widely used as one of the core elements to deal with and to respond to major disruptions. Therefore, building resilient supply networks has become an important issue for managers, stakeholders, and researchers. However, the complexity arises when large numbers of companies are networked together to achieve some collaborative advantage. The combination of large-scale interdependencies and unpredictable behavior creates new challenges for managing risk. Different actors make decisions at different times and consequently with different sets of information guiding them. The network resilience results from the interaction of all network components. The presence of interdependence between nodes in different networks makes the resilience assessment more difficult, since the failure of nodes in one network may cause a disruption at its dependent node in another network. Traditional theories and approaches do not fully address the technical and managerial challenges of today’s supply chains. Hence, one challenge faced by researchers is how to assess the resilience. The main objective of this chapter is to define and formalize a method for a holistic resilience assessment in complex supply networks.