Agent-based Supply Chain Simulation: towards an Organization-oriented Methodological Framework

The Supply Chain (SC) organizational structure, and related management policies, is an important factor that can be adjusted to improve the SC performance, which consequently has to be taken into account in the SC modeling and simulation. In the context of an agent-based SC simulation, this paper addresses a new methodological framework, organizationally oriented, which permits modeling and simulation of such SC organizational aspects, allowing observables of different levels of details while reproducing the SC behavior according to desired observables. This methodological framework is structured according to two main abstraction levels, a conceptual level and an operational level. At the conceptual level, a Conceptual Role Organizational Model (CROM) is produced, and then refined into a Conceptual Agent Organizational Model (CAOM). At operational level, CAOM model is translated into an OPerational Agent Model (OPAM) which will be implemented and simulated in a specific agent based software architecture briefly introduced in this paper.