Agent Based Modeling and Simulation of Structural Hole Based Order Allocation Strategy

Order allocation is one of the most important decision-making problems of firms having significant influences on performances of themselves and the whole supply chain. Existing researches about order allocation have mainly focused on evaluating capabilities of directly connected suppliers so that it is hard to consider effects and interactions from undirected connections over multiple lower-layers. To alleviate the limitation, this paper proposed a novel approach to order allocation using structural hole. By applying the concept of structural hole to the supply network, we could evaluate the structural supplying powers of firms with respect to both of direct and indirect connections. In the proposed approach, we derived a methodology to measure the potential supplying power of each firm by modifying the effective size as one of the measurements of structural hole and then, proposed its application, the structural hole based order allocation strategy. Furthermore, we conducted the agent based modeling of supply chain to perform the decision-making process of order allocation and simulated the proposed strategy. As a results, by coping with the variance of demand more stably, it could improve the performance of supply chain from the aspects of fill rate, inventory level and demand-supply balance.