The Use of Agent-Based Models Boosted by Digital Twins in the Supply Chain: A Literature Review

Abstract

Supply chain management has become an essential and integral part of business, it allows to reach out company’s success and customer satisfaction because it has the power to boost customer service, reduce operating costs and improve the financial standing of a company by keeping and improving competitive advantages. In the current market with a fiercer competition, shorter product life cycles, changes in technologies, and increasingly interconnected economies; supply chain management is boosted by means of mind-boggling technological innovations like Digital Twins and Agent-Based Model. Since supply chains are now building with increasingly complex and collaborative interdependencies, Agent-Based Models are an extremely useful tool when representing such relationships, to obtain a formal and more simplified description of a system (that can be as complex as the relationships between the agents of all the supply chain, from the supplier, the manufacturer, to the distributor of a product or service) and as an optimization technique for mitigation of risk. While Digital Twins are new solutions elements for enable real-time digital monitoring and control or an automatic decision maker with a higher efficiency and accuracy.