A Novel Time Advancing Mechanism for Agent-Oriented Supply Chain Simulation

Among the techniques supporting a multidecision context, as a supply chain is, distribution simulation can undoubtedly play an important role in a co-operative environment. The distribution simulation for supply chain has its advantages to find and solve bottleneck of supply chain. Considering the design of distribution simulation platform for supply chain, the realization of time synchronization and time advance will be the key points. This paper proposes an advancing mechanism that integrates High Level Architecture with multi-agent distributed simulation to meet time management in supply chain simulation, i.e., a ’heterogeneous’ system is built during our research. We present some preliminary experimental results which illustrate the performance of our advancing mechanism on our platform established. Finally, the experimental results have demonstrated the novel time advancing mechanism can be successfully applied in supply chain contexts, and surely prove that it is feasible and scientific.