Designing a resilient agriculture supply network for mitigating the disruptions

The paper investigates the resilience of an agriculture supply chain through the lens of complex network perspective. Given the susceptibility of these supply chains to bothrandom events (rainfall and yield uncertainty), and targeted events (income tax raids on millers, strikes, and lockouts), as well as spillover effects of disruptions; we propose a supply chain architecture that helps in achieving a balanced performance against these disruptions. For this, we propose a new attachment rule—‘price/cost-based attachment rule’, which we use along with degree-based and distance-based attachment rules in generating a resilient supply chain topology. We call the proposed supply chain network—‘Balanced Supply Network’ whose performance is compared with a scale-free network (BA Network) and a random network (ER Network). The comparison is based on critical performance indicators such as availability (demand and supply availability rate) and connectivity (size of largest all-role connected component). The findings, on expected lines, reveal that our proposed network exhibits a performance trade-off between BA Network and ER Network when subjected to targeted disruptions and disruption propagation scenarios. However, in case of random disruptions, it ensures maximum resilience and even outperforms BA Network due to its construction properties. Further, to optimize resilience, we introduce weights to the attachment rules of our proposed network. These weight assignments enable us to identify the most effective configuration among the three attachment rules for enhancing the network’s ability to withstand disruptions.