Study of the performance of multi-behaviour agents for supply chain planning

In today's industrial context, competitiveness is closely associated to supply chain performance. Coordination between business units is essential to increase this performance, in order to produce and deliver products on time to customers, at a competitive price. While planning systems usually follow a single straightforward production planning process, this paper proposes that partners adapt together their local planning process (i.e. planning behaviours) to the different situations met in the supply chain environment. Because each partner can choose different behaviour and all behaviours will have an impact on the overall performance, it is difficult to know which is preferable for each partner to increase their performance. Using agent-based technology, simulation experiments have been undertaken to verify if multi-behaviour planning agents who can change planning behaviours to adapt to their environment can increase supply chain performance. These agents have been implemented in an agent-based planning platform, using a case study illustrating a lumber supply chain. The performance analysis shows that advanced planning systems can take advantage of using multiple planning processes, because of the dynamic context of supply chains.     

Design and optimization of integrated E-supply chain for agile and environmentally conscious manufacturing

An agile and environmentally conscious manufacturing paradigm refers to the ability to reconfigure a flexible system quickly, economically, and environmentally responsibly. In modern manufacturing enterprises, e-supply chains integrate Internet and web-based electronic market and are promising systems to achieve agility. A key issue in the strategic logistic planning of integrated e-supply chains (IESCs) is the configuration of the partner network. This paper proposes a single- and multiobjective optimization model to configure the network of IESCs. Considering an Internet-based distributed manufacturing system composed of different stages connected by material and information links, a procedure is presented to select the appropriate links. A set of performance indices is associated with the network links. Single-criterion and multicriteria optimization models are presented under structural constraint definitions. The integer linear programming (ILP) problem solution provides different network structures that allow to improve supply chain (SC) flexibility, agility, and environmental performance in the design process. The proposed optimization strategy is applied to two case studies describing two networks for desktop computer production.     

Guidelines for Collaborative Supply Chain System Design and Operation

Over the past decade, firms have adopted supply chain management as a critical element of their corporate strategies. Despite these efforts, it is our observation that many firms do not realize the anticipated benefits of constructing collaborative operating relationships with supply chain partners. Our purpose in this paper is to establish a set of guiding principles for the effective design and execution of supply chain systems. These principles suggest why, what, and how collaborative relationships should be constructed.While constructing and operating a competitive supply chain is the primary objective of supply chain management, we have observed several impediments to achieving this goal. First, demand uncertainty is so substantial in most supply chain environments that if it is not adequately addressed, it can severely degrade the anticipated performance of the supply chain as measured in terms of unit cost, speed, quality, and responsiveness to changing conditions. Second, supply chains with poor physical characteristics that operate with long and variable response times cannot take full advantage of collaborative relationships due to their inability to respond to changes in the environment. Third, firms with poor information infrastructures lack the capabilities necessary to acquire, store, manipulate, and transmit data effectively and quickly. Fourth, business processes are often not designed properly, both intra- and inter-organizationally, to adapt to evolving supply chain conditions. Finally, decision support systems and operating policies that guide day-to-day operating decisions may not be adequately designed to contend with supply chain uncertainty.We also suggest that the strategic and tactical modeling paradigms employed in supply chain decision support systems are inadequate in many operational environments because of the manner in which uncertainty is treated. Furthermore, collaborative relationships that focus on reducing the uncertainty in operating environments by employing improved information systems and business processes will result in more efficient allocation of key resources, faster response times to market forces, and more reliable supply chain performance; however, these collaborative arrangements by themselves cannot compensate for fundamentally flawed and operationally ineffective manufacturing and distribution environments.     

Information technology, operational, and management competencies for supply chain agility: Findings from case studies

Given the growing emphasis on the need for supply chain agility to sustain competitive advantage, this study explores the impact of the relationship between supply chain competence and supply chain agility on firm performance. Although the influence of supply chain agility on firm performance has been acknowledged, this study further articulates the relationship from the perspective of inter-organizational collaboration. We develop a conceptual model based on the resource-based view and employ a multi-case study method in this exploratory research. Our findings highlight the importance of distinguishing the difference between supply chain agility and supply chain competence and their impact on firm performance. This study contributes to the growing body of conceptual and empirical literature on supply chain agility and adds to the understanding of the complexity of supply chain competence.     

Modeling and IT Perspectives on Supply Chain Integration

The essence of supply chain management is integrated planning of activities across the firm's supply chain, including those of its suppliers and customers. Integrated planning refers to functional, geographical and inter-temporal coordination of managerial decisions. It requires and invokes modeling systems and processes that support data-driven or fact-based planning. A major challenge is to understand how to seamlessly imbed modeling systems in the firm's information technology. This paper examines five perspectives on these connections.     

Leveraging information sharing to configure supply chains

As supply chains evolve beyond the confines of individual organizations, information sharing has become the holy grail in supply chain technology. Although the value of information sharing is well recognized, there is little research on how to use it to configure supply chains. This paper proposes a parameterized model to capture information sharing in a supply chain. By changing the parameters of this model, we actually adjust the degree of information sharing and create new supply chain configurations. Configurations are the means of responding to events or changes in supply chains in a timely manner. A complete example is used to demonstrate this methodology. We also perform simulation experiments to compare configurations and to understand the effect of information sharing on supply chain performance. Thus, we show how to achieve supply chain configurability by leveraging information sharing. A supply chain architecture which allows agility, adaptability and alignment of partner interests is also proposed based on this methodology.     

Agent-based modeling and simulation of an autonomic manufacturing execution system

Production management systems must constantly deal with unplanned disruptive events and disturbances such as arrivals of rush orders, raw material shortage/delays or equipment breakdowns along with a multitude of interactions in the supply chain which constantly demand on-line task rescheduling and order execution control. For responsiveness and agility at the shop-floor, a distributed design for manufacturing execution systems is proposed based on autonomic units that fill the gap between production planning and shop-floor control. An interaction mechanism designed around the concept of order and resource agents implementing the monitor-analyze-plan-execution loop is described. Generative simulation modeling of an autonomic manufacturing execution system (@MES) is proposed in order to evaluate emerging behaviors and macroscopic dynamics in a multiproduct batch plant. Results obtained for an industrial case study using a simulation model of the proposed @MES are presented. The usefulness of agent-based modeling and simulation as a tool for distributed MESs design and to verify performance, stability and disturbance rejection capability of an interaction mechanism is highlighted.     

基于拉格朗日松弛的供应链合作生产计划模型研究

为解决供应链生产计划协调问题,通过市场价格和中间库存因素使供应链上下游企业结合成一个整体,建立一种供应链上下游一体化计划模型,从整体考虑供应链合作计划问题．为获取问题的可行解,采用拉格朗日松弛技术进行优化,为供应链上下游企业在信息共享条件下实现“多赢”目标,提供了理论依据．仿真结果验证了模型和算法的有效性．     

产业互联下面向云平台的智造供应链信息协作

平台的供应链信息协调问题,探索产业资源协作效率路径.本文提出云平台解决智造供应链信息协作的方案,该方案考虑了分布式协作理论应对庞大供应链业务数据的技术优势,构建了分布式下实时动态更新算法和共享数据资源池相结合的供应链企业数据互联互通协作模型,以提升产业制造的“智造”能力.最后以家居产业供应链进行分析论证,验证了云平台模型构建的可行性和有效性.     

Dynamic simulation assessment of collaboration strategies to manage demand gap in high-tech product diffusion

There is no question that many high-tech supply chains operate in a context of high process and market uncertainties due to shorter product life cycles. When introducing a new product, these supply chains must manage the cost of supply, including the cost of capacity and inventories, with revenues from the product’s demand over its life cycle. However, in early phase of introduction after earlier buyers purchase, there might be a demand gap for a period followed by a sudden surge. To stay responsive and serve the market downstream after such gaps, two important decisions must be made: (a) the sizing of the capacity, and (b) the level of collaboration. It is the intention of this paper to show that the chosen level of collaboration effects significantly on managing the gap in the demand trajectory in new high-tech product diffusion. We study the impact of different collaboration strategies like vendor managed inventory (VMI), jointly managed inventory (JMI), and a collaborative planning, forecasting & replenishment (CPFR) model using system dynamics based simulation and compare the results with a non-collaborative chain. Our results yield insights into effectiveness of collaboration in managing the dynamics of demand gap.     

The effects of collaboration on build-to-order supply chains: with a comparison of BTO,MTO, and MTS

The initiative of collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment has generally provided rich options of strategies for build-to-order (BTO) supply chain members. In this study, we examined collaborative activities across BTO, make-to-order (MTO), and make-to-stock (MTS) supply chains. We draw upon the results from an empirical research from 126 manufacturing companies to illustrate what collaborative activities will enable companies to achieve better market performance, given their particular production circumstances. We have provided three major findings in this study: (1) identified a set of activities that are viewed as important for collaboration by business managers; (2) recognized various effects of collaboration on BTO, MTO, and MTS; and (3) illustrated the association between collaborative activities in BTO, MTO, and MTS supply chain and firm’s market performance.     

IOS drivers of manufacturer-supplier flexibility and manufacturer agility

In today’s hypercompetitive environment, it is critical for manufacturing firms to be agile in responding to ephemeral opportunities in the marketplace. This agility often requires the collaboration with supply chain partners. However, how a manufacturing firm collaborates with its suppliers to achieve agility remains an understudied issue. This study holds that manufacturing firms and their suppliers need to develop manufacturer-supplier flexibility accompanied with well-built integrated information systems and associated analytical systems (such as business intelligence) to enable manufacturer agility. To deepen our understanding of the roles of manufacturer-supplier flexibility and IOS technologies in facilitating manufacturer agility, we build and test a model based on the real options theory and bounded rationality. Based on 141 matched-pair samples of Taiwanese manufacturing firms, our findings demonstrate the importance of manufacturer-supplier flexibility in achieving higher manufacturer agility, wherein IOS integration enables better flexibility. We also show IOS-enabled analytical ability can strengthen the effect of such flexibility on manufacturer agility. Implications of the results for practices and academics are provided.     

Supporting agile supply chains using a service-oriented shop floor

The globalized nature of current business environments led to the emergence of new networked enterprise organizational paradigms (supply chains, extended enterprises, virtual enterprises, collaborative networks, etc.) to meet changing requirements and tackle profitable but volatile opportunities overall agility is required.Eventually the shop floor will have to react and accommodate (re)adjustments in the supply chain making it an important piece in the competitiveness puzzle. So far, the research focus has been in high level aspects of supply chain management and the integration of shop floor activities in the process has been left relatively unattended.However, shop floor data is increasingly required in business tools that support decision making. In this context, failing to support agility at shop floor level can compromise the agility of the supply chain.Recent developments in networked information technologies and embedded devices allow enabling intelligence in shop floor rendering it an active and live entity that further enhances the dynamics of the supply chain.The goal of the present work, supported by an implemented test case in the assembly domain, is to demonstrate how one is able to seamless integrate the shop floor with external tools and achieve a highly reconfigurable environment that adapts to changing production requirements and disturbances using service-oriented technology.     

The role of the customer order decoupling point in production and supply chain management

In order to compete successfully, operations in any type of firm need to be strategically aligned to the market requirements. This concerns both manufacturing and supply chain operations. The customer order decoupling point (CODP) is getting increasing attention as an important input to the design of manufacturing operations as well as supply chains. This paper investigates the impact of the position and role of the CODP on issues of concern for production and supply chain management. The focus is on the design and strategic planning aspects of the supply chain, and the design of manufacturing planning and control systems. The paper proposes a dual design approach for production and supply chain planning systems; one type of system for operations upstream the CODP and another type of system for downstream operations in order to fully support the characteristics and objectives of each respective part of the supply chain.     

An application to support the temporal and spatial distributed decision-making process in supply chain collaborative planning

In the context of supply chains operations planning, mathematical programming models have been mainly used for centralised decision-making. However, the supply chain (SC) members not always agree on the alignment of individual decisions to SC-wide objectives and are usually reluctant to share all the required SC-wide information. For these reasons, SC decentralised decision making, in which different decisional units have to be coordinated to achieve a certain level of SC performance, is the most usual situation. In this collaborative planning (CP) context, spatial and temporal integration among the different SC decisional parts has to be considered. This paper aims to develop an application which supports the integrated modelling and execution of the CP decision-making process in SCs made up of several decisional centres (DCs) which make decisions based on mathematical programming models (as in Advanced Planning Systems) under temporal and spatial integration. The described application has been used to assist the CP of a real ceramic SC. The results are also reported.     

Supply chain redesign for resilience using simulation

Supply chains are facing numerous changes that are contributing to increasing their complexity and vulnerability to disturbances, therefore, to survive, supply chains must be resilient. The paper presents a supply chain simulation study for a real case concerned with the Portuguese automotive supply chain. The subset automotive supply chain involved in the case study is a three-echelon supply chain, composed by one automaker, two 1st-tier suppliers, two 2nd-tier suppliers, and one outsource entity. The purpose of the study is to evaluate alternative supply chain scenarios for improving supply chain resilience to a disturbance and understanding how mitigation strategies affect each supply chain entity performance. Two strategies widely used to mitigate disturbance negative effects on supply chains were considered and six scenarios were designed. The scenarios differ in terms of presence or absence of a disturbance in one hand and presence or absence of a mitigation strategy in other hand. To evaluate the scenarios designed, two performance measures were defined per supply chain entity, Lead Time Ratio and Total Cost.     

制造商与零售商应对产品评论智能协同决策机制研究综述

产品评论作为供应链中产品信息共享的一种新的途径正在变得日益流行与重要,供应链中制造商与零售商正面临考虑产品评论条件下如何利用智能群推荐的协同决策。首先分析了制造商与零售商应对产品评论智能协同决策机制起源于供应链协同决策、群推荐系统及产品评论;然后对现存的制造商与零售商应对产品评论智能协同决策机制进行概述,包括了理论、策略及实证方面的成果,并分析这些机制之间的关系;最后对制造商与零售商应对产品评论智能协同决策机制研究文献进行分析归纳,提出理论、策略及实证方面研究问题,并指出将来研究内容与方向。     

Simulation-based evolutionary algorithm approach for deriving the operational planning of global supply chains from the systematic risk management

One of the most critical issues facing supply chain managers in today’s globalized and highly-uncertain business environment is how to proactively deal with risks that might cause serious severances and distortions of material flows in a supply chain. This paper proposes a simulation-based evolutionary algorithm approach for deriving the operational planning of global supply chains from the systematic risk management, which proactively deals with the negative consequences of random and hazardous risk events in sourcing, production, distribution, and transportation in an integrated way. The proposed approach incorporates the production lot size of the plant, order quantity and reorder point of DC, and five response coefficients as decision variables to potential risks. The proposed approach is successfully applied to an industrial example of a consumer electronics manufacturing company. The results of the computational study show that the systematic risk management of global supply chains using the proposed approach increases the profit by 20% and 16.1% in the industrial example in comparison with passive and active risk management, respectively. In addition, a mixed strategy for the inventory management of distribution centers is suggested to improve the profits of global supply chains subject to substantial risks.     

Evaluating the supply chain performance of IT-based inter-enterprise collaboration

With the use of IT, the nature of business processes has changed from intra- to cross-enterprise. This has significantly altered enterprise interactions with suppliers and customers. Collaboration is essential for successful supply chain performance. In recent years a variety of initiatives have been adopted by industries. These attempted to create efficiency and effectiveness through integration of the activities and processes. However, enterprises can only gain significant benefits by mass collaboration. Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR), which result in deeper partnerships, have become an important factor in supply chains. We investigated the performance of CPFR; it possesses formalized guidelines and is a relatively new initiative. By using simulation, we investigated four CPFR alternatives that are used in the adoption of collaboration strategies in industries. Retailers have traditionally played the hub role in supply chains in order to reduce the bullwhip effect, but our simulation confirmed that shifting the retailer (buyer-driven) collaboration to a manufacturer (supplier-driven) approach was a more viable option.     

A Web-based tool and a heuristic method for cooperation of manufacturing supply chain decisions

Supply chain issues have been given much attention. Various technologies and concepts have been applied to improving and optimizing supply chain performance. However, few methods to explore supply chain inter-relationships, detect process key problems and co-ordinate planning processes in different supply chain partners are available. A Web-based co-ordinated planning process supported by quality function deployment (QFD) approach is proposed in this research. The planning method is focused on integrating planning processes in supply chains by optimizing each planning process and interactively adjusting key parameters in different business processes. The QFD approach is employed to inter-relate different business processes and detect key problems through Internet technique application, so that the global solution can be heuristically improved. The planning method imitates the real-world supply chain planning environment and provides a mechanism for decision-makers to communicate with quantitative information in planning processes through the Web system. An illustrative case study in packaging industry is conducted to describe the planning procedure. The result of the example shows prospect of the method in improving supply chain cooperation. The approach is expected to facilitate supply chain planning and support managers to solve targeted problems more efficiently.