Symbiotic Simulation Control in Supply Chain of Lubricant Additive Industry

With the increasing growth of manufacture networks as well as the global competition in the lubricant industry, efficient management of a supply chain is vital for large vertically-integrated petroleum companies. Operational decision-making should consider the entire supply chain which includes upstream raw material suppliers, down-stream customers, as well as the internal entities of the specialty chemicals company. A supply chain simulation model can serve as a valuable quantitative tool to aid offline analysis and optimization. However, solutions are still needed for on-line control and decision support. We present a symbiotic simulation control system (SSCS) which is based on a generic framework for symbiotic simulation. It utilizes proactive what-if analysis to improve the performance of inventory management and reactive what-if analysis to find solutions to low finished product fill rate. The experimental results demonstrate that this control system can achieve notable performance improvement over common practice and can be used to provide decision support and control in near real-time.