The importance of the structural pattern for the resilience of circular economy networks: A network-based approach

This paper investigates the resilience of circular economy (CE) networks. By adopting a graph theory approach, a novel simulation model is developed to simulate the resilience performance under the effect of multiple types of disruptions. Simulation analyses are carried out to analyse the effect of the structural pattern of the CE network on resilience by comparing the performance across scale-free, small-world, and Erdos-Renyii-like patterns. The results confirm that the structural pattern affects resilience. In particular, they show that CE networks characterized by a scale-free pattern absorb random-placed disruptions better than the others, while CE networks characterized by a small-world pattern are more resilient to target-placed disruptions.