Title: A hybrid simulation approach to planning in a VMI supply chain

Authors: Jayendran Venkateswaran, Young-Jun Son, Albert T. Jones, Hyeung-Sik J. Min

Addresses: Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, 400 076, India. ' Department of Systems and Industrial Engineering, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA. ' Manufacturing Systems Integration Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, USA. ' Critical Infrastructure Modeling and Simulation, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM 87185, USA

Abstract: In this paper, we propose an innovative approach of integrating the vendor managed inventory (VMI) strategy with a hierarchical approach to production planning (HPP) decisions within a supply chain environment. The proposed architecture is divided into three stages: plan optimisation (Stages I), schedule optimisation (Stage II) and decision evaluation (Stage III). To implement this architecture, we use system dynamics simulations, discrete-event simulations and the High Level Architecture (HLA) as a distributed infrastructure. We describe our approach for the analysis of supply chains in detail and discuss results from experiments that demonstrate the benefits of the proposed architecture.

Keywords: hybrid distributed simulation; system dynamics; discrete-event simulation; supply chain management; SCM; VMI supply chains; vendor managed inventory; hierarchical production planning; HPP.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSPM.2006.012642

International Journal of Simulation and Process Modelling, 2006 Vol.2 No.3/4, pp.133 - 149

Published online: 05 Mar 2007 *

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