Distributed supply-chain simulation using high level architecture

摘要

Supply-chain management covers the planning and management of material and information flow from the manufacturer through the aistributors, and finally to the customer. With the globalization of markets the effective practice of supply-chain management is crucial for improving a company's competitive advantage. Simulation can help the company to facilitate the design, evaluation and optimization of their supply-chain. To support the reusability of existing simulation models in a supply-chain simulation. a common standard is required for enabling interoperability amongst different simulation programs through a well-defined interface. High Level Architecture (HLA) is an architecture for reuse and interoperation of simulation components. This paper reports our experiences on employing HLA to support reusability and interoperability by' adapting a semi-conductor supply-chain simulation for the HIA. Our experiments show that by fine-timing the integration of the application with the HLA Run-Time Infrastructure (RTI), considerable performance improvements can be achieved. As visualization is important in understanding such a simulation. some issues involved in providing visualization support for the supply-chain simulation are also discussed.