Spread of Perturbations in Supply Chain Networks: The Effect of the Bow-Tie Organization on the Resilience of the Global Automotive System

Many real-world systems are subject to external perturbations, damages, or attacks with potentially ruinous consequences. The internal organization of a system allows it to effectively resist to such perturbations with more or less success. In this work, we study the resilience properties of the global automotive supply-chain by considering the bow-tie structure of the directed network stemming from customer-supplier relationships. Data have been retrieved by Bloomberg supply chain database between 2018 to 2020. Our analysis involves 3,323 companies connected by 11,182 trade links and spanning 135 economic sectors. Our results indicate that the size of propagation of a perturbation depends on the area of the bow-tie structure in which it initially originates. Also, it is possible to identify resistance structures within some bow-tie areas. Thus, we provide insights into the fragility and resilience of different network components and the diffusion paths of perturbations across the system. Interestingly, the level of abstraction used allows our results to generalize beyond the case in question to many systems that can be represented through directed graphs.