An Improvement Approach for Bullwhip Effect in Multi-Product and Multi-Stage Supply Chains

Bullwhip effect has always been considered as one of the critical problems in a supply chain that negatively influences costs, inventory, reliability and other important business processes especially in upstream agents. This problem has become even more critical due to the increased complexity of global supply chains. This paper aims to develop a simulation approach based on system dynamics modeling to create specific supply chain to quantify the bullwhip effect as well as to reduce such effect and adaptive network based fuzzy inference system for quantifying and reducing the bullwhip effect in a multi-product, multi-stage supply chain which their agents release their order based on inventory model. The proposed model is comprised of three groups of variables, namely the structure of a supply chain network, supply chain contributions and supply chain performances.