Resilience space of interdependent networks: insights from industrial symbiosis

Industrial symbiosis networks—groups of locally connected industries that circulate wastes and by-products—exemplify highly interdependent supply-chain clusters where a disruption may trigger catastrophic cascading impacts. This paper proposes a resilience space framework that moves beyond individual resilience curves to create a comprehensive three-dimensional resilience space capturing how resilience varies across disruption severities. The framework analyzes how networks sustain resilience across cascading failure scenarios and reveals thresholds where resilience collapses. Jointly using complex network analysis and discrete-event simulation, we compare 35 industrial symbiosis networks worldwide to explore how network and actor characteristics alter resilience space across failure scenarios. Key findings show that network-level connectivity, (inter-)dependency, characteristic path length, and node heterogeneity of supply dependency negatively impact resilience space, while actor-level stream-based supplier diversity, supply buffers, and rapid access to contingency suppliers demonstrate beneficial effects. These findings reveal multiple bottlenecks constraining resilience, providing pathways to navigate trade-offs between scale, connectivity and centralization—typically pursued for efficiency in circular economy—and compromised resilience, which highlights the need for complementary network and operational interventions. © 2026 Published by Elsevier Ltd.