Starting as raw materials and ending as finished goods, consumer products traverse a wide array of facilities and transport systems collectively known as the supply chain.  One can think of the facilities (factories, warehouses, retail outlets) as nodes in a network, with transportation arcs connecting them.  Increasingly, industry has sought to minimize cost and improve response time throughout the supply chain.  These efforts, however, often are hindered by the unpredictable nature of supply chain elements, not to mention interactions between elements.

Analysts and engineers often use computer simulation as a method to model system unpredictability.  In this project, we use a distributed simulation methodology to model the distributed nature of the supply chain.  In this methodology, supply chain elements each are modeled as independent simulation models that communicate with one another, much as factories and warehouses communicate, and that pass material to one another through transport systems that are similarly modeled as independent simulations.  These simulation models can execute on different computers, communicating with one another over the internet using High Level Architecture (HLA), a software infrastructure for support of distributed simulation available from the U.S. Department of Defense.  The goal is to create a means of testing different supply chain strategies and operational tactics, under different scenarios, to see which is likely to achieve best performance.  An eventual goal is to integrate the simulation methodology with rough-cut analytic tools that can provide faster analysis and decision-making.

The Keck Virtual Factory Lab is collaborating with scientists from the Gintic Institute of Manufacturing Technology in Singapore on this project.

Contact:  leon.mcginnis@isye.gatech.edu