Supply Chair Demonstrator Based on Federated Models and HLA Application

Supply chains are complex systems that are difficult to be understood from the viewpoint of the single enterprise. This often leads to local optimizations that form an optimum for one company or a short section of a supply network. Such local optimizations endanger the competitiveness of the whole supply chain, as today not the single enterprise, but the production network (sometimes named Virtual Enterprise) has to be the competitive entity. Simulation could help to understand the full network and to study and improve the network as a whole. However, the development of such networks is complicated, as it models several distributed entities and might also be forced to introduce the human-in-the-loop or to include IT control systems in the simulation run. The authors propose a supply chain demonstrator, that can run distributed, combine several (local) simulation models into one federation and also include non-simulation federates like human user interfaces or additional IT systems.