Empirical Research on Vulnerability Assessment of Supply Chain Network Based on Cascading Effect

The growing complexity of the supply chain brings benefits as well as vulnerability. The research on the reasons of vulnerability of the supply chain and the evaluation method is the premise of implementing effective management measures. Based on cascading effect, complex network theory is applied to model the supply chain network and evaluate the importance of supply chain node enterprises. For an important node, its failure will cause great cascading effect to damage the supply chain, which reveals the vulnerability of the supply chain network. In this paper, the empirical analysis shows that this method can accurately identify the visible critical nodes, and it is also able to find hidden important nodes, which helps offer guidance for the protection of node enterprises, thus to reduce the vulnerability of supply chain.