EcoSupply: A machine learning framework for analyzing the impact of ecosystem on global supply chain dynamics

Abstract

A global supply chain spans several regions and countries across the globe. A tremendous spurt in the extent of globalization has necessitated the need for modeling global supply chains in place of the conventional supply chains. In this paper, we propose a framework, EcoSupply, to analyze the supply chain ecosystem in a probabilistic setting unlike the existing methodologies, which presume a deterministic context. EcoSupply keeps track of the previous observations in order to facilitate improved prediction about the influence of uncertainties in the ecosystem, and provides a coherent mathematical exposition to construe the new associations, among the different supply chain stakeholders, in place of the existing links. To the best of our knowledge, EcoSupply is the first machine learning based paradigm to incorporate the dynamics of global supply chains. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.