Simulating competition schemes in agent-mediated supply chain ecosystems

With the rapid advance of information technology, supply chains evolved from clusters of connected companies to a virtual e-marketplace that serves as a central hub for many companies that buy and sell. Over this large community of companies supply chains can be dynamically formed by mediator agents. From the view of an ecosystem, the companies that are connected in the e-marketplace can be viewed as individual entities that have self-interest. They however compete for survival as well as collaborate with each other for projects. This paper is concerned with simulating how dynamic make-to-order supply chains are formed based on two different job competition schemes from the perspective of a supply chain ecosystem. One can see in the simulation that the supply chain ecosystem grows in different directions. One scheme called Cost-driven principle leads to destructive competition while the other one namely Pareto-optimal evolves into a cooperative competition that tries to mutually benefit every participant. Through a visualization tool that we built we show that the Pareto-optimal principle is preferable to the Cost-driven principle in the long-term with regard to global survival.