Eva.CAN: a network based model for the food supply chains

Summary: supply chains are complex adaptive systems always evolving. They react to internal and external systemic stimuli implementing developments due to relations and socio-economic and technical interactions between the various companies belonging to the system. For each company the benefit to operate in a well-organized and well-managed system exceeds the profit that it would take working alone. To exploit this benefit at best it’s necessary to know the structure of the system and the relationships between the companies. This allows to act on the actors which occupy strategic positions for obtaining the desired outcome. The growing need for continuous innovation makes it absolutely necessary deep knowledge of the system, of its components and of relationships between the actors binding them as in a network. Structure and relations affect the whole system dynamics. A supply chain is well represented by a network where the nodes are the actors and the links represent the relationships between them. For this reason we designed and propose a new concept model, the first model for an agri-food supply chains system designed as a complex network which exploits Network Theory analysis methods. It highlights the characteristics of the system topology and identify the network nodes occupying strategic positions. Measurements on unweighted and weighted network proved that the model works well and makes sense. This allows to perform simulations of various kind in future studies to implement improvements and innovative actions.