Distributed supply chain simulation across enterprise boundaries

Abstract

The effective practice of supply chain management (SCM) is crucial to improve corporations' competitive advantage. Many corporations have built simulation models to facilitate the application of simulation in designing, evaluating, and optimizing their supply chain. Traditionally, a supply chain involves only a single enterprise with multiple facilities and distribution centers. Hence, sharing of detailed simulation models is not a problem in this scenario. But in recent years, the scope of SCM has evolved to cross the enterprise boundaries. Applying simulation in designing, evaluating, and optimizing the supply chain becomes more difficult since the participating corporations might not be willing to share their simulation models with partners. Distributed simulation techniques are presented as an enabling technology that allows corporations to construct a cross enterprise simulation while hiding model details within the enterprise. This can be realized by either building the simulation on top of the Runtime Infrastructure of the High Level Architecture or building the simulation on top of a customized distributed discrete event simulation protocol. These alternative approaches are compared in terms of their performance and interoperability. The comparison of the performance is done through a benchmarking test of a semiconductor supply chain model.