Abstract
The bullwhip effect is an important phenomenon of supply chains where the demand fluctuations are amplified as they go up the supply chain. In some previous studies, it has been reported that sharing the final demand information among the participants of the supply chain is effective for suppressing the demand fluctuation amplifications. In many actual supply chains, however, there are not always capital relationships among all the participants. In such a case, it is difficult for the participants to share the final demand information, which is because the rule of profit distribution has not been established. In this paper, a new supply chain model is proposed that realizes the sharing of demand information in a different way. In this model, each participant provides the final demand information for the next participant along with its order information. Consequently, the final demand information can be relayed to every upstream participant in the supply chain although communication delays arise. Since there are business connections among each adjoining participant, it is considered to be easily realizable for each participant to transmit the final demand information along with its order information. Mathematical formulation and numerical simulations show that the proposed model suppresses the bullwhip effect despite sharing the delayed information, unlike the non-information-sharing model.
