Network Structure and Logistics Efficiency: a New Approach to Analyse Supply Chain System

摘要

The study of organizational structure and function of supply chain system is receiving abundant attention in recent years. Network theory has become a powerful approach to provide insight analysis of the structure-activity relation in supply chain system. In this paper, a new method to study the efficiency of logistics processes in supply chain system from the perspective of topology is proposed. By considering the stochasticity of customer demands and delivery delay caused by processing capacity, a logistic algorithm is applied on two kinds of network models, Uncorrelated and Clustering Configuration Model, for supply chain system. Simulation results indicate that the logistics dynamics of supply chain system are highly related to the connection features, especially the clustering structure. Using two measurements of the supply chain system, we show that the Clustering model could provide better performance than Uncorrelated network with shorter Order lead-time and higher Delivery efficiency.