Modeling System

Supply chain decision making requires rapid and flexible modeling approach at various levels of detail. Object oriented modeling can be used to design and implement reusable classes for building models of supply chains and store them in a software library (or object library as generally called). The concept of an object library facilitates rapid model development of any given supply chain and aids in application of the modeling architecture to specific scenarios at various levels of abstraction.

The modeling system provides a library of generic supply chain objects. One can construct hierarchical models of any supply chain under consideration using these objects. These constructs can be modeled at required granularity to aid in strategic, tactical, and operational decisions. The modeling process starts with identification of the various entities of the network. These entities are instantiated by selecting the required classes from the object library and customizing them to the requirements. The attributes and the functions of the objects are suitably configured. The actual physical entities are instantiated by initializing the various attributes and functions of these objects. The various policy objects associated with these entities can also be defined according to the specific need.

The network configuration can be updated at any point of time by adding or altering various objects of the supply chain without having to take recourse to large scale programming efforts. DESSCOM can therefore be used to optimize the system and evaluate performance measures under different scenarios. The development time for various models is considerably reduced. These models are used to provide inputs for various tools of the decision workbench. The details of the object models have already been considered in an earlier section. We shall discuss the features of the decision workbench in the next section.