THE SUPPLY CHAIN MODELING LANGUAGE (SCML)

1 Introduction A common limitation of the published research is that the models developed are only tested on one supply-chain or, in a few cases, on a small number of supply-chains. This directly conflicts with the "utility" goal of supply-chain modeling. The fruits of the time and effort spent developing a supply-chain model are not fully realized when only a specific supply-chain is analyzed. Application to multiple, generic, supply-chains increases the impact of the model development work and, most importantly from a research perspective, describes the broad picture with results that may be generalizable. This is preferable since in most cases it is not known whether a particular supply-chain is representative of supply-chains as a whole and whether results are applicable to supply-chains of different structures. A related limitation of the published literature is that each specific supply-chain studied is analyzed with only a single methodology, generally by a single researcher utilizing a single model. Thus, in addition to models not being utilized to their fullest, the test supply-chains are not being analyzed by all means available. In effect, supply-chain modeling, as practiced in the academic literature, is a "one-off" process. An important factor contributing to the one-off nature of supply-chain modeling is the absence of a set of testable supply-chains in a ready-to-use format. We develop the Supply Chain Modeling Language (SCML) to address the information sharing difficulties affecting supply-chain researchers and practitioners. SCML is a platform-independent, methodology-independent, XML-based markup language that provides a generic framework for storing supply-chain structural and managerial information. We developed the Visual Supply Chain Editor (VSCE) as a dedicated SCML editor. This allows users to easily create SCML-formatted supply-chain descriptions without directly editing any SCML markup. SCML is designed with interoperability and ease of adoption in mind. We have developed SCML processing software for two popular programming environments, Visual Basic and Java, that make the process of SCML-enabling other applications much easier. 1.1 Motivation The motivation behind developing a standard method for storing supply-chain information, both structural and managerial, is that a standard encoding method encourages data sharing. Data sharing for supply-chain analysis is currently very rare but provides a great opportunity to increase effectiveness of both supply-chain management researchers and practitioners. A universal method for describing a supply-chain's structural and managerial attributes will enable sharing of this information between analysts, providing each a group of supply-chains to apply their models to. In addition …