Re: [Swarm-Modelling] Hello- Few questions about Swarm applications to SCM

[Dr. Béla Pátkai]

Hi Yogeshwar,

Yes, it is possible to model and simulate Supply Chains with Swarm, some 
packages have been developed for this purpose. Those three I know of are:

I. Fu-Ren Lin, Troy J. Strader, Michael J.Shaw developed a supply chain 
simulator for Swarm in Objective-C. If you are a C programmer this may 
be interesting for you (as far as I can tell C code is easy to wrap into 
objc classes). They published a paper on it in the first Swarm book 
"Economic Simulations in Swarm - Agent-Based Modelling and Object 
Oriented Programming", the paper is "Using Swarm for Simulating the 
Order Fulfillment Process in Divergent Assembly Supply Chains". The code 
is probably available on the swarm ftp, at least I have it on my hard 
drive from somewhere.

II. The most extensive package is Pietro Terna's jES Java Enterprise 
Simulator, http://web.econ.unito.it/~terna/jes/ developed in Java. You 
will find lots of material on his pages.

III. A simpler and more production - and factory scheduling - oriented 
package is under development at my institute. It is not currently 
available for download but I can send you a private snapshot. You can 
get an idea of it by having a look at an older javadoc: 
http://www.pe.tut.fi/personal/patkai/software/modnet/Doc/index.html

There may be more SCM packages, I'm sure others will tell.

However, it really depends on what you want to do. Agent-Based Modelling 
is best suited for problems with many interacting agents (or 
components/individuals), where the interactions are "interesting". If 
you know something about the "parts" and want to understand the "whole", 
and you want to understand how the micro- and the macro world relate to 
each other then you might want to do ABM. However, if your problem is 
such that you are able to use optimization then ABM may not be necessary.

BR Bela




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Béla Pátkai Ph.D. /Researcher/
Product and Production System Design Lab
Institute of Production Engineering
Tampere University of Technology
Korkeakoulunkatu 6, 33720, Tampere, Finland
Mail: P.O.Box 589, 33101 Tampere, Finland
Tel: +358 3 3115 3276
Fax: +358 3 3115 2753
GSM: +358 40 7545 200
Institute: www.pe.tut.fi
Personal: www.pe.tut.fi/personal/patkai
Complex Systems Network: www.tut.fi/complex
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