A distributed discrete event dynamic model for supply chain of business enterprises

Abstract

We treat supply chain of business enterprises as a distributed system of collaborative processes, where the system dynamics is governed by the events that occur within each enterprise and/or across several enterprises. While each enterprise has its own middleware for handling business transactions, we argue that there is also need for a meta-middleware across the whole supply chain. We present a formalism to build the control structure, which must be embedded in such a meta-middleware. We provide an illustrative example.