An object-oriented simulation meta-model to analyse supply chain performance

This paper proposes a meta-model, which allows automatic building of simulation models of supply chains. The proposed meta-model is made up from a user interface (to define the characteristics of the supply chain), an ad hoc objects library and a software application, to build the simulation model. The meta-model can dramatically reduce to a few minutes or even seconds the time required to test a specific configuration of a supply chain and/or a specific management policy and, since the simulation model is automatically built, neither the personnel skills nor the time available to build the simulation model represent significant hurdles anymore. The meta-model has been applied to represent a simplified supply chain according to six different scenarios, where demand is deterministic. For each scenario a simulation campaign has been performed and the outputs of the model (built through the proposed meta-model) correspond to the predicted results.