Reconstructing supply networks

TL;DR

This paper reviews methods for reconstructing production supply networks from limited data, highlighting their importance and outlining future research directions in this emerging field.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of current approaches to supply network reconstruction and discusses unique challenges and future research needs.

Findings

Survey of existing reconstruction methods

Identification of key challenges in supply network inference

Proposed research agenda for future work

Abstract

Network reconstruction is a well-developed sub-field of network science, but it has only recently been applied to production networks, where nodes are firms and edges represent customer-supplier relationships. We review the literature that has flourished to infer the topology of these networks by partial, aggregate, or indirect observation of the data. We discuss why this is an important endeavour, what needs to be reconstructed, what makes it different from other network reconstruction problems, and how different researchers have approached the problem. We conclude with a research agenda.