The COVID19 pandemic has highlighted the lack of resilience in supply chains, as global networks fail from disruptions at single nodes and connections. Through an overview of the existing vaccine and pharmaceutical supply chain publications focusing on resilience, as well as recent papers reporting modeling of resilience in supply chains across multiple fields, we find that models for supply chain resilience are few and most of them are focused on individual dimensions of resilience rather than on comprehensive strategy necessary for scaling up vaccine production and distribution in emergency settings. We find that COVID19 resulted in a wave of interest to supply chain resilience, but publications from 2020 are narrow in focus and largely qualitative in nature; evidence-based models and measures are rare. Further, publications often focus exclusively on specific portions of the specific supply chain of interest, excluding associated supporting networks, such as transportation, social and command and control (C2) necessary for vaccine production and equitable distribution. This lack of network analysis is a major gap in the literature that needs to be bridged in order to create methods of real-time analysis and decision tools for the COVID19 vaccine supply chain. We conclude that a comprehensive, quantitative approach to network resilience that encompasses the supply chain in the context of other social and physical networks is needed in order to address the emerging challenges of a large-scale COVID-19 vaccination program. We further find that the COVID-19 pandemic underscores the necessity of positioning supply chain resilience within a multi-network context and formally incorporating temporal dimensions into analysis through the NAS definition of resilience, plan, absorb, recover, adapt, to ensure essential needs are met across all dimensions of society.
Human conflict, geopolitical crises, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters can turn large parts of energy distribution networks offline. Europe's current gas supply network is largely dependent on deliveries from Russia and North Africa, creating vulnerabililties to social and political instabilities. During crises, less delivery may mean greater congestion, as the pipeline network is used in ways it has not been designed for. Given the importance of the security of natural gas supply, we develop a model to handle network congestion on various geographical scales. We offer a resilient respo…
An insufficient supply of effective SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in most countries demands an effective vaccination strategy to minimize the damage caused by the disease. Currently, many countries vaccinate their population in descending order of age (i.e. descending order of fatality rate) to minimize the deaths caused by the disease; however, the effectiveness of this strategy needs to be quantitatively assessed. We employ the susceptible-infected-recovered-dead (SIRD) model to investigate various vaccination strategies. We constructed a metapopulation model with heterogeneous contact and fatality rat…
The Texan electric network in the Gulf Coast of the United States is frequently hit by Tropical Cyclones (TC) causing widespread power outages, a risk that is expected to substantially increase under global warming. Here, we introduce a new approach of combining a probabilistic line fragility model with a network model of the Texas grid to simulate the temporal evolution of wind-induced failures of transmission lines and the resulting cascading power outages from seven major historical hurricanes. The approach allows reproducing observed supply failures. In addition, compared to a static appro…
National economies rest on networks of millions of customer-supplier relations. Some companies -- in the case of their default -- can trigger significant cascades of shock in the supply-chain network and are thus systemically risky. Up to now, systemic risk of individual companies was practically not quantifiable, due to the unavailability of firm-level transaction data. So far, economic shocks are typically studied in the framework of input-output analysis on the industry-level that can't relate risk to individual firms. Exact firm-level supply networks based on tax or payment data exist only…
Vaccination against COVID-19 with the recently approved mRNA vaccines BNT162b2 (BioNTech/Pfizer) and mRNA-1273 (Moderna) is currently underway in a large number of countries. However, high incidence rates and rapidly spreading SARS-CoV-2 variants are concerning. In combination with acute supply deficits in Europe in early 2021, the question arises of whether stretching the vaccine, for instance by delaying the second dose, can make a significant contribution to preventing deaths, despite associated risks such as lower vaccine efficacy, the potential emergence of escape mutants, enhancement, wa…
The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the demand for goods and services worldwide. The combination of a public health emergency, economic distress, and misinformation-driven panic have pushed customers and vendors towards the shadow economy. In particular, dark web marketplaces (DWMs), commercial websites accessible via free software, have gained significant popularity. Here, we analyse 851,199 listings extracted from 30 DWMs between January 1, 2020 and November 16, 2020. We identify 788 listings directly related to COVID-19 products and monitor the temporal evolution of product categories includ…
Towards Geostrategic Critical Minerals and Materials Resilience: Secure Supply-Chain and Criticality Analyses for Quantum Technologies in Arctic and Space Environments
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Korea Institute of Industrial Technology (KITECH)（韩国产业技术研究院）；Los Alamos National Laboratory（洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室）；Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI)（国际治理创新中心）
Link failures in supply networks can have catastrophic consequences that can lead to a complete collapse of the network. Strategies to prevent failure spreading are thus heavily sought after. Here, we make use of a spanning tree formulation of link failures in linear flow networks to analyse topological structures that prevent failures spreading. In particular, we exploit a result obtained for resistor networks based on the \textit{Matrix tree theorem} to analyse failure spreading after link failures in power grids. Using a spanning tree formulation of link failures, we analyse three strategie…
Supply chains need to balance competing objectives; in addition to efficiency they need to be resilient to adversarial and environmental interference, and robust to uncertainties in long term demand. Significant research has been conducted designing efficient supply chains, and recent research has focused on resilient supply chain design. However, the integration of resilient and robust supply chain design is less well studied. This paper develops a method to include resilience and robustness into supply chain design. Using the region of West Africa, which is plagued with persisting logistical…
Building resilience into today's complex infrastructures is critical to the daily functioning of society and its ability to withstand and recover from natural disasters, epidemics, and cyber-threats. This study proposes quantitative measures that implement the definition of engineering resilience advanced by the National Academy of Sciences. The approach is applicable across physical, information, and social domains. It evaluates the critical functionality, defined as a performance function of time set by the stakeholders. Critical functionality is a source of valuable information, such as the…
The structure and design of optimal supply networks is an important topic in complex networks research. A fundamental trait of natural and man-made networks is the emergence of loops and the trade-off governing their formation: adding redundant edges to supply networks is costly, yet beneficial for resilience. Loops typically form when costs for new edges are small or inputs uncertain. Here, we shed further light on the transition to loop formation. We demonstrate that loops emerge discontinuously when decreasing the costs for new edges for both an edge-damage model and a fluctuating sink mode…
Resilient-to-Fragile Transition and Excess Volatility in Supply Chain Networks
Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；Macrocosm, Inc.（宏景公司）；Centre Borelli, ENS Paris-Saclay, Univ. Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷高等师范学校巴黎萨克雷大学博尔利中心）；Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford（牛津大学马丁学院新经济学研究所）；Utrecht University（乌得勒支大学）；Capital Fund Management（资本基金管理）；X-CFM Chair of EconophysiX, Ecole polytechnique（巴黎综合理工学院X-CFM经济物理学讲席）；Académie des Sciences（科学院）
