Abstract | To achieve competitive advantage in today’s global markets, supply chains need to be reconfigured in order to respond to unpredictable changes. Aiming to enable and deliver agile responses and rapid reaction, we propose a multi-agent framework for flexible modeling and simulation of supply chains using reconfigurable production cells. Our novel approach will enable the structural model and the controller model to be considered separately, and enable high quality simulation models to be rapidly built and reconfigured using relevant production cells. To accomplish these capabilities, a four-layered conceptual modeling framework is proposed, which provides an adaptable and tailorable mechanism to support simulation model reconfiguration. In addition, two categories of reconfigurable production cells can be extracted from the bottom layer of the framework to help users to quickly create a conceptual model using functional “building” blocks or templates. |
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