Emergent Effects from Simple Mechanisms in Supply Chain Models

It has been widely recognised that today's supply chains are a lot more complex than those in the past. This recognition has prompted calls for supply chains to be recognized and be studied as complex adaptive systems to make them more relevant to the needs of the modern-day, real-world supply chain. In the context of supply chain modelling, these calls are already answered by a number of prominent works that study the emergence of supply chain topology from undefined supply chain structures. In this paper, we present another form of emergence and demonstrate that it can be induced by simple mechanisms when a supply chain is modelled as a complex adaptive system.