A Novel Agent-based Approach for Supply Chain Retrofitting

Supply Chain Management involves the material and information management through the entire supply chain (SC), from the initial suppliers to the end users, going through manufacturing and distribution facilities. The main objective is to achieve suitable economic performance taking into account the large amount of constraints featuring this kind of problems. In this work, decisions that have a long lasting effect on the firm such as the design and retrofit decisions have been considered. The decision variables are the storage sites capacities, and the flows and production rates of materials to be produced/transformed at each node, to meet the demand requirements. The retrofitting tasks are accomplished by using a SC agent-oriented simulation model, which includes each entity belonging to the SC as an independent agent and represents in a functional way the interactions between the components of the chain. This is a suitable tool for evaluating the impact that possible design decisions could have in the network. The starting point is a set of possible design options for the existing SC. For each design alternative a performance index is obtained through the agent-based system, which looks for the best value of the operational variables associated to the resulting network. This approach shows that similar configurations can lead to considerably different values of the SC performance index.