Study of supply chain’s brittleness based on the complex system brittle theory

At present, the competition between enterprises has evolved as the competition between supply chains. The progressively competition brings a lot of risks to supply chain, and the risks arose supply chain brittleness, then weaken its performance. This paper studies factors contributing to supply chain's brittleness ,then based on brittle theory, proposes several conceptions such as brittleness entropy, co-brittleness entropy and brittleness relationship entropy, et al. Then the measurement of system's total brittleness is given. Finally, the brittleness of a simple three-stage supply chain system is analyzed.