NSF Award
0075606
This research addresses the need for decision support tools in this area by developing a Supply Chain Optimization and Protocol Environment (SCOPE) which emulates the behavior of supply chains involving multiple, independent, goal-seeking entities over time. Entities will be represented by optimization models that capture the key decision variables and technological constraints, while retaining enough special structure to allow efficient solution. Interactions among entities will be described through protocols that specify what goods, money and information pass among entities, in what order entities make decisions, how information is<br/>processed by each entity to make its decisions, and how entities respond to unforeseen events. The approach combines computational tractability and scalability with the ability to explore the behavior of different supply chain configurations over time. It will also allows the researchers to represent a range of different modes of interaction among entities in the supply chain.<br/><br/>Successful development of a tool like SCOPE would permit rapid prototyping of supply chain designs, while researchers would have a test bed for assessing how well theoretically-derived results generalize to different modes of operation that strain some of the original assumptions, and for experimenting with forms of supply chain collaboration too complex for treatment analytically.
