Supply Chain Management System Modeling And Analysis

Nowadays, enterprises and organizations are faced with permanently changing markets, global competition and rapidly decreasing cycles of technological innovation. One of the key concepts in modern enterprise operation is the efficient management of its supply chain. The supply chain is a network. Supply chain management is introduced to address the integration of organizational functions ranging from the ordering and receipt of raw materials throughout the manufacturing processes to the distribution and delivery of products to the customer. In order to achieve high performance, supply chain functions must operate in an integrated and coordinated manner.The supply chain is supposed to have the capacity of rapid reaction to market changes, which is known as the agility of supply chain. With the changing markets and situations, the construction of supply chain as well as the roles of enterprises will, consequently, be different. For example, an enterprise may convert to a manufacturer from a supplier. When supply chain is analyzed according to the integrated evaluation of supply chain, for instance, by analyzing such key indices as the average time used to finish a task by a supply chain which consists of dynamic alliance and the sources required by the supply chain members, the bottleneck which affects the evaluation of supply chain will be discovered; when some supply chain members can't meet the requirements, it is possible to modify or delete them.Several challenging problems associated with integrated supply chain design are: how to model and coordinate the supply chain business processes? how to analyze the performance of an integrated supply chain network so that optimization techniques can be employed to improve the efficiency of the network? how to design the supply chain model to meet dynamically changing needs of the market? So development methodologies are critical to solve these problems.The thesis believes that the above problems can be authentically reflected by the supply chain model, which is characterized by being reconfigurable, reusable and scalable. Therefore, this thesis tries to use Agent technology and UML to describe the static behavior of the objects present in the supply chain model, and use Petri nets to describe its dynamic behavior and to evaluate the system performance.