A Practical Multiagent Model for Resilience in Commercial Supply Networks

As commercial supply chains grow into complex global supply networks, more and greater risks are introduced for cooperating and competing companies alike. These networks can be affected by events such as natural disasters, terrorism, and of late, economic downturn. Supply industry leaders, such as IBM, have announced a need for methods to identify and prevent risks in these ever-growing complex networks. Multiagent-based simulation lends itself perfectly to supply network modeling due to its autonomous nature. Our research illustrates a multiagent supply network formation technique using greedy supply agents and limited resource allocation. Using these formations, the resilience of each network is compared with others and assessed so that we may ascertain the characteristics of risky supply network structure. Our results show that an increase in relationship resources results in a more resilient network; however, as the amount of available resources increases, the risk of the most vulnerable agent in the network decreases by a smaller margin.