Adding more backup suppliers can actually make a supply chain collapse even faster when a crisis hits.
March 19, 2026
Original Paper
Supply Chain Resilience Integrating a Permacrisis Perspective: Multi-Agent Simulation and Topological Optimization of Tesla Giga Shanghai
SSRN · 6437507
The Takeaway
By analyzing Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory, researchers identified a 'Redundancy Paradox.' While moderate backup helps, once a supply network becomes too interconnected, risks propagate instantly through the whole system rather than staying contained, causing a total failure that simpler networks would have survived.
From the abstract
In the current era of "Permacrisis," global supply chains are transitioning from facing occasional "Black Swan" events to enduring continuous stress tests from "Gray Rhino" risks (highly probable but often neglected threats). This paper integrates Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) theory with Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) to investigate the non-linear impact of network topology on supply chain resilience. First, by introducing triangular structures into single-chain networks, we reveal a "Redundancy P