A survey of simulation techniques in commerce and defence

Despite the developments in Modelling and Simulation (M&S) tools and techniques over the past years, there has been a gap in the M&S research and practice in healthcare on developing a toolkit to assist the modellers and simulation practitioners with selecting an appropriate set of techniques. This study is a preliminary step towards this goal. This paper presents some results from a systematic literature survey on applications of M&S in the commerce and defence domains that could inspire some improvements in the healthcare. Interim results show that in the commercial sector Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) has been the most widely used technique with System Dynamics (SD) in second place. However in the defence sector, SD has gained relatively more attention. SD has been found quite useful for qualitative and soft factors analysis. From both the surveys it becomes clear that there is a growing trend towards using hybrid M&S approaches

Global supply chains of high value low volume products

Imperial Users onl

A multi-agent-based novel framework for flexible and tailorable modeling and smart simulation for supply chains

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

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND THE VERTICAL ORGANIZATION OF INDUSTRY

A model has been developed to study the interdependence between the choice of information technology and industry structure. Advances in information technology might provide incentives for a firm to specialize or focus on its core competence. However, the degree of specialization depends on the extent of industry-level specialization, which is, in turn, the result of the behavior of individual firms and their adoption of information technology favoring specialization. Emerging electronic markets and industries have been chosen as an application domain, as they would not exist without information technology.

End-of-life vehicle (ELV) recycling management: improving performance using an ISM approach

With booming of the automobile industry, China has become the country with increasing car ownership all over the world. However, the end-of-life vehicle (ELV) recycling industry is at infancy, and there is little systematic review on ELV recycling management, as well as low adoption amongst domestic automobile industry. This study presents a literature review and an interpretive structural modeling (ISM) approach is employed to identify the drivers towards Chinese ELV recycling business from government, recycling organizations and consumer’s perspectives, so as to improve the sustainability of automobile supply chain by providing some strategic insights. The results derived from the ISM analysis manifest that regulations on auto-factory, disassembly technique, and value mining of recycling business are the essential ingredients. It is most effective and efficient to promote ELV recycling business by improving these attributes, also the driving and dependence power analysis are deemed to provide guidance on performance improvement of ELV recycling in the Chinese market