A Multi-Agent Simulation Research On The Value Of Global Demand Information Sharing In B2B Supply Chain

Information sharing is one of the hot issues of the supply chain research. The models established by previous scholars mostly are based on information transfer mode, which ignored the research on the third party model and information sharing center model. In the context of B2 B e-commerce, it is possible to achieve the latter two information sharing modes. This paper analyzes the microscopic mechanism of the latter two information sharing modes and proposes global demand information sharing mode and local demand information sharing mode.In this paper, based on the multiple-supplier supply chain model, the supply chain composes of a manufacturer and multiple suppliers. Manufacturers select a certain number of on-line procurement suppliers through the B2 B platform. Manufacturer selects suppliers and allocates orders according to certain index system for supplier evaluation; Suppliers decide whether to adjust the next issue of price and service level to achieve maximum profits according to the number of orders and profits or not.During the process of purchasing, manufacturers can reduce their purchasing cost by sharing demand information to improve the enthusiasm of suppliers. In this paper, the type of demand information sharing is summarized as two kinds: 1) local demand information sharing. Suppliers only know their own orders quantity, while they don’t know the total orders quantity; 2) global demand information sharing. Downstream enterprise shares total orders information to all suppliers. Suppliers know their orders quantity and the total orders quantity. Under the condition of global demand information sharing, a lower share of the orders will have strong incentive effects on suppliers, which may lead suppliers to make more efforts to reduce the product price or improve the service, to strive for more orders. It eventually bring benefit to the downstream enterprises.In this paper, we use Anylogic software to build multi-agent simulation models. We research the manufacturer’s order allocation, suppliers’ dynamic pricing and analyze the incentive effects of the global demand information sharing. We further research the influence of the distribution of supplier costs, the potential suppliers, and suppliers’ pricing strategy, the number of selected suppliers and manufacturers order allocation rules on the value of global demand information sharing.The main conclusions of this study are as followings. The number of the selected suppliers are closer to the number of suppliers, the value of global demand information sharing is more obvious. The manufacturer should select a certain number of suppliers so that it can get the best value of global information sharing.Sharing supplier evaluation rules can increase the value of the global information sharing, but when the rules predicted by suppliers are consistent with the supplier evaluation rules, there is no value of sharing supplier evaluation rules.