Supply chain resilience in the context of I4.0 and I5.0 from a multilayer network ripple effect perspective

In the context of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) and Industry 5.0 (I5.0), a supply chain (SC) is digital and dynamic with a multi-structural framework, and should be resilient in the case of an abrupt disruption. To uncover SC characteristics under this environment, this paper proposes a five-layer interdependent supply chain network (SCN) to depict this multi-structural framework of a SC, then analyzes the topological features and dynamic evolution process of the multilayer SCN. To explore the impact of SCN structure on mitigating disruption propagation, this study presents the risk propagation mechanism in the multilayer SCN. Simulations considering four risk scenarios are carried out based on the Tesla SCN and its dynamic evolution to reveal the resilience of the multilayer SCN for mitigating the ripple effect of disruption propagation. Results show that (1) the ripple effect caused by node failure differs from that caused by the failure of the sub-network layer, which is more serious and significantly different with different network structures of SCN; (2) under the same SCN structure, different sub-networks have different impacts on the entire SCN in terms of mitigating the ripple effect; (3) in the five-layer SCN proposed in this study, product and technological structures are crucial for maintaining the stability of the SCN. Organizational, financial, and information structures are most unstable elements in the SCN. Once the nodes in these three structures fail, risk easily spreads through the entire SCN. Suggestions are provided to encourage a fresh approach to improving the resilience of the SCN.