An organization-oriented methodological framework for agent-based supply chain simulation

Abstract

The SC organizational structure, and related management policies, is a crucial factor that can be adjusted to improve the SC performance, which consequently has to be taken into account in the SC modeling and simulation. This paper addresses a new methodological framework in the context of an agent-based SC simulation, which permits modeling and simulation of such SC organizational aspects, allowing observables of different levels of details. This methodological framework is structured according to two main abstraction levels, a conceptual level and an operational level. For each of these levels, different models are proposed and presented in detail. This methodological framework is associated with a multi model and multi-paradigm software architecture adapted to the SC simulation.