Production, logistics, and traffic: a systematic approach to understand interactions

Decision-makers in and around today’s supply chains are facing tough decisions every day. However, when making decisions, they rarely consider what effects their decisions cause upon other participants of the supply chain or traffic management. This is mostly due to the lack of appropriate tools which help indicating the possible effects. Such tools are necessary to tackle the inherent complexity of the whole supply chain system. This paper describes how to construct and design such a tool for this interdisciplinary environment, called an Interdisciplinary Decision Map (IDM). The IDM is a powerful tool to visualise complex relationships, while at the same time retaining usability by showing relevant information only. We show how to use a specific instance of an IDM to facilitate a better understanding of the underlying processes of other supply chain participants. The soundness of our approach is backed by findings from an interdisciplinary research project.