A Flexible Model for Supply Chain Coordinated Decision

The paper presents a flexible operational model of supply chains (SC) which can be used to evaluate the coordination of supply chain operational decisions. Its flexibility brings on the powerful capability of description for business processes, operational policies, resources or performances of SC. The integration of various operational policies provides the capability to evaluate their coordination under stochastic market. The SC is modeled simply using `nodes´ and `arcs´, which presents the (semi)autonomous parties and their relationship respectively. The nodes are a kind of intelligent agents with the operational policies encapsulated in them. Each node is composed of six core processes: source, make, inventory, deliver, transportation and finance. Each process has two different `status´, named as `active´ and `inactive´. Through combinations of the different status of each process, the nodes can express different functionalities. Unlike most similar work to this topic, not only a conceptual framework is described, but also the concrete modeling details are presented. A preliminary prototype is implemented and two experiments of bull whip effect demonstration are executed to validate the model