Appeared in Decision Sciences, 29(3), 1998:
Modeling Supply Chain Dynamics: A Multi-Agent Approach
Jay Swaminathan, Stephen F. Smith and Norman Sadeh
The Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
Abstract
A global economy and increase in customer expectations in terms of cost and services
have put a premium on effective supply chain reengineering. It is essential to perform
risk-benefit analysis of reengineering alternatives before making a final decision. Sim-ulation
provides an effective pragmatic approach to detailed analysis and evaluation of
supply chain design and management alternatives. However, the utility of this method-ology
is hampered by the time and effort required to develop models with sufficient
fidelity to the actual supply chain of interest. In this paper, we describe a supply chain
modeling framework designed to overcome this difficulty. Using our approach, supply
chain models are composed from software components that represent types of supply
chain agents (like retailers, manufacturers, transporters), their constituent control elements
(like inventory policy), and their interaction protocols (like message types). The under-lying
library of supply chain modeling components has been derived from analysis of
several different supply chains. It provides a reusable base of domain-specific primitives
that enables rapid development of customized decision support tools.
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