Supply chains are not new, but their importance has grown in recent years due to globalisation, tough competition and the increasingly networked nature of business. Simulation methods have long been applied in production-inventory systems and have found increased use in supply chain management. Given that supply chains are geographically distributed entities, 'it seems sensible to consider the application of distr~buted computation to their simulation. This proposition is based on several prospective advantages of dis!ributed supply chain simulation (DSCS) that seem likely to make this kind of modelling worthwhile. However, notwithstanding these potential advantages, favourabie application conditions and the genuine interest of academics and practitioners in DSCS, there is hardly any evidence that real-life applications are used in industry. This thesis considers five potential drivers that might make distributed supply simulation attractive and useful. These are used as the basis of an analysis of the relevant literature. The empirical part describes the DSCS implementation of an educational supply chain game as an example application, which allows investigation of the value of DSCS for the holistic analysis of collaboration, and also provides some insights into other application drivers. These include the possible implementations of information sharing in distributed settings; in particular, their effects on the dynamics of pipeline and network supply structures. The concluding research stages discuss the difficulties ofDSCS and the ways they may be overcome. Thus, the main research c~mtribution is the unbiased assessment of practical usefulness, potential, feasibility and difficulties of DSCS in industry derived from the perspectives of literature review and gained practical modelling experience.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:485171 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Artamonov, Alexey |
| Publisher | Lancaster University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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