Simulation in the supply chain context - a survey_266106186.pdfVIP

Computers in Industry 53 (2004) 3–16 Simulation in the supply chain context: a survey Sergio Terzia,*, Sergio Cavalierib aPolitecnico di Milano, Department of Economics, Industrial and Management Engineering, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133 Milan, Italy b ` Department of Industrial Engineering, Universita di Bergamo, Viale Marconi 5, 24044 Dalmine, Italy Received 29 January 2003; accepted 13 June 2003 Abstract The increased level of competitiveness in all industrial sectors, exacerbated in the last years by the globalisation of the economies and by the sharp fall of the final demands, are pushing enterprises to strive for a further optimisation of their organisational processes, and in particular to pursue new forms of collaboration and partnership with their direct logistics counterparts. As a result, at a company level there is a progressive shift towards an external perspective with the design and implementation of new management strategies, which are generally named with the term of supply chain management (SCM). However, despite the flourish of several IT solutions in this context, there are still evident hurdles to overcome, mainly due to the major complexity of the problems to be tackled in a logistics network and to the conflicts resulting from local objectives versus network strategies. Among the techniques supporting a multi-decisional context, as a supply chain (SC) is, simulation can undoubtedly play an important role, above all for its main property to provide what-if analysis and to evaluate quantitatively benefits and issues deriving from operating in a co-operative environment rather than playing a pure transaction role with the upstream/downstream tiers. The paper provides a compre