Bridging criticality assessment and supply chain resilience: a structured framework for operationalizing mitigation actions

Abstract

Critical raw materials underpin the energy transition, defense, and digitalization, yet criticality assessments remain diagnostic: they quantify supply risk and vulnerability without prescribing how to act. This gap is addressed through a structured review, from which 139 mitigation actions across mechanisms, capability types, and disruption pathway categories were compiled, harmonized, and classified. A dependency matrix encodes 278 relationships between actions. To operationalize the resulting catalog, a five-stage decision funnel is introduced to filter it by actor-specific structural boundaries and operational readiness. The illustrative application to vehicle electronics shows that no single action is universally applicable, and the set of suitable actions varies with the actor, temporal horizon, degree of control, and disruption profile. By making actor-specific feasibility and inter-action dependencies explicit, the framework enables companies and countries to assemble coherent mitigation portfolios rather than deploying isolated actions whose prerequisites, amplifications, or contradictions remain unexamined.