In this work, decisions that have a long lasting effect on the SC such as the design and retrofit of a production/distribution network are considered. The retrofitting tasks are accomplished by using a SC agent-oriented simulation system, which model each entity belonging to the SC as an independent agent and represents in a functional way the interactions between the components of the SC. The starting point is a set of possible design options for the existing SC. For each design alternative a performance index is obtained through the agent-based framework, which is coupled with a genetic algorithm (GA) that looks for the best value of the operational variables associated to the resulting network.
Fernando D. Mele, Gonzalo Guillén, Antonio