Symbiotic simulation for business process re-engineering in high-tech manufacturing and service networks

In today's highly competitive business environment, the speed of a company's response to changes by adapting its own business processes is vital to its survival. In this paper, we propose a symbiotic simulation system that can monitor the real-world operations of high-tech manufacturing and service networks, carry out what-if analysis and optimization on service-oriented based business workflow, and dynamically deploy the optimized business workflow onto the real-world operations. A case study of an aerospace spare parts logistics system was carried out to investigate the viability of the system.