A resilience by teaming framework for collaborative supply networks

• A framework for design and operation of resilient supply networks is developed.
• Resilience is obtained by teaming disruption-prone agents to overcome disruptions.
• Teaming increases fault tolerance using fewer resources than traditional approaches.
• Protocols increase resilience in production and distribution networks’ applications.

Supply network resilience is an emerging concept related to the ability of a network to tolerate disruptions; current understanding of its meaning and dimensions, its role in the design and operation of supply networks, and its relation to sustainability is at its early stages. Existing approaches are based on the trade-off between increased resources and higher fault-tolerance. The Fault Tolerance by Teaming (FTT) principle of Collaborative Control Theory has been applied in sensor networks effectively and appears as a promising original approach not based on the aforementioned trade-off and capable of producing networks with higher resilience.Inspired by the FTT principle, a Resilience by Teaming Framework (RBT) for supply networks is developed to address the design and operation of resilient supply networks. RBT is tested and validated through the application of its protocols to case studies in production and distribution networks. Evidence from case studies’ results suggests that through FTT-based protocols and RBT it is possible to achieve higher fault tolerance with fewer resources than under traditional approaches.