Benchmarking the collaboration in the supply chain

Abstract

Collaboration is an important issue in supply chain management. As the operations in companies have reached a level of efficiency, researchers have begun to put their emphasis on collaboration between different stages in a supply chain. In this paper, to quantitatively benchmark the effect of collaboration, a new Petri net form, combinatorial Petri net, is put forth by combining a traditional Petri net with inference technologies such as fuzzy logic, etc. This new Petri net form not only simulate the working process in Discrete Event Dynamic Systems (DEDSs), but also model the decision-making process. By this newly developed Petri net form, a simplified supply chain is benchmarked for two situations: with and without collaboration. By comparing the inventory behaviour for these two situations, the contribution of collaboration can be evaluated. In practice, this benchmarking system can be a platform to assess different collaboration schemes before implementing them.