Building an architecture to support change in the manufacturing supply chain

Abstract

In recent years, changes in social systems have intensified, and supply chains need to be flexible to the environment. However, supply chains are complex systems and change is not easy because of the possibility of unintended side effects. In this study, we modelled the supply chain in three domains (value, function and actors) and implemented a multi-agent simulation based on the model to support changes in the manufacturing supply chain. The results of the simulation are organized in terms of the bill of materials to quantitatively show the influence relationship between value, function and actor, and to identify which parts and which production process are bottlenecks in the current situation. Based on the influence relationships, we developed a method to compare the proposed changes based on cost performance and to reevaluate the proposed changes by simulation. The proposed method was applied to an virtual household appliance, and the results showed that the proposed changes had a certain degree of validity, suggesting the effectiveness of the method.