A Discrete-Continuous Combined Modeling Approach for Supply Chain Simulation

Supply chain management (SCM) is a strategic paradigm to coordinate cash, material, and information flows from raw material to customer. Supply chain simulation (SCS) is a strong and popular tool for designing, evaluating, and optimizing the structure of supply chains, and it requires an important task to estimate the effect of the planning to coordinate such flows in SCM. Stochastic natures existing in the supply chain can be analyzed efficiently using simulation. One uses discrete-event simulation to model a supply chain in general. However, the nature of the supply chain system is neither completely discrete nor continuous; both aspects must be considered together in developing an SCS model. In this paper, a framework of discrete-continuous combined modeling for supply chain simulation is proposed. Equations for the continuous aspects of a supply chain in this framework are included, and a simple example of the SCS model using this equation is presented.