Distributed supply chain simulation in a DEVS/CORBA execution environment

Abstract

The emerging electronic commerce and rapidly changing business environments place strong requirements on a next-generation supply-chain analyzer to simulate the flow of goods through the entire supply chain in a timely manner. Such requirements include scalable and efficient model execution and support for flexible future extensibility based on an open industry standard. This paper presents design considerations for a supply chain modeling and simulation environment to execute in a parallel and distributed manner on a DEVS/CORBA run time infrastructure. We recall that DEVS (Discrete Event System Specification) is a sound formal modeling and simulation framework based on generic dynamic systems concepts that can integrate into a parallel and distributed run time infrastructure. CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is an open standard that is rapidly gaining universal business acceptance. It can be employed as middleware to support a heterogeneous, network-centric, distributed computing environment that includes modeling and simulation as well as other business objects. Implementing a distributed supply chain simulator in a DEVS/CORBA execution environment not only may significantly improve execution speed but also may provide an advanced supply chain model development capability based on the DEVS modeling and simulation framework.