Essays in collaborative supply chains: Information sharing, event management and process verification.

摘要

With the advent of information technology in a highly interconnected economy, supply chains are required to be agile and adaptive. An agile and adaptive supply chain can sense changes or events in real time and respond to them quickly by self adjustment. This adjustment involves changes in information sharing and supply chain processes. Therefore, information sharing, event management, and process modeling and verification play an important role. In this dissertation, each of these issues is addressed in a separate essay. Therefore, this dissertation consists of three interrelated essays.;The first essay describes a new methodology for achieving supply chain configurations by dynamic information sharing. We propose a parameterized model to analyze information sharing. By changing the parameters of this model, we actually adjust information sharing needs and achieve different supply chain configurations, which are further evaluated in terms of supply chain performance. When events or changes bring new information sharing needs, we can respond to the needs with suitable configurations.;The second essay focuses on supply chain events. A formal approach based on colored time Petri nets is developed to model and analyze events. Based on Petri net models, we derive dependency graphs to analyze causal relationships between events. We also perform sensitivity analysis to show the impact of different event resolution strategies on supply chain performance.;The third essay models and verifies supply chain processes based on workflow technologies. Inter-organizational processes are usually complicated and unstructured. We describe a taxonomy that serves as a framework for analyzing unstructured workflows. The taxonomy characterizes unstructured workflows in terms of two considerations: improper nesting and mismatched pairs. Based on this taxonomy, we develop a diagnosis algorithm that can detect structural flaws, show causes of flaws and draw conclusions on workflow correctness.;Based on the results of these three essays, we are able to develop a technical architecture for agile and adaptive supply chains. This architecture contains an event management engine to detect and analyze events. Suitable configurations are selected in response to events. Finally, processes are carefully verified to ensure accurate information sharing and supply chain configurations.