Andrew Smith and I have been looking at the problem of resiliency in supply chain networks. That is, given the fact that supply chains are formed by selfish agents who create links with others based on their own local interests, we cannot expect the resulting network to always have the optimal resiliency characteristics. It is quite possible that because everyone is acting myopically—agents care only about their immediate neighbors—that the resulting network will have some bad global properties. The global property Andrew studies first is
resiliency, which we define as the ability of the network to withstand the loss of one node.
Andrew presented his paper titled A Practical Multiagent Model for Resilience in Commercial Supply Networks at the latest Agent-Mediated Electronic Conference. He implements a model which generates supply chain networks based on a well-known model from management theory, so the networks' topology should match real world networks, and then examines the resiliency of the resulting networks. The results are not surprising in the general sense (more connections mean more resiliency) but they do give us a quantitative measure of network resiliency.
Below are the slides from his presentation:
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