It has become a matter of survival that many companies improve their supply chain efficiency. This presents an opportunity for simulation. However, there are many challenges that must be overcome for simulation to be a contributor to play an effective role. Four contributors discuss the opportunities that they see for simulation to play a meaningful role in the area of supply chain management.

Tactical and operational planning for manufacturing enterprises are more important today than ever before as their supply chains span the globe. Two state-of-the-art technologies that are critical to success are Discrete Event Simulation and Advanced Planning and Scheduling. They are commonly applied in designing and executing operations at each site within the supply chain. However, as supply chains become leaner and more responsive, operational constraints and stochastic influences within the manufacturing sites and the logistics network require a combination of both technologies applied to the entire supply chain. This paper describes a novel framework for advanced distributed simulation with integrated APS procedures for collaborative supply chain optimization. The framework can be used for fast optimization of both planning procedures and execution policies and also provides a base for easy implementation of simulation results. A prototype of a distributed semiconductor supply chain simulation has been developed and is currently being refined.

The rapid changing business environment of high-tech asset intensive enterprises such as semiconductor manufacturing constantly drives production managers to look for better solutions to improve the manufacturing process. Simulation, though identified to be the most appropriate technique to generate and test out possible execution plans, suffers from long cycle-time in the process of model update, analysis and verification. It is thus very difficult to carry out prompt "what-if" analysis to respond to abrupt changes in these systems. Symbiotic simulation systems have been proposed as a way of solving this problem by having the simulation and the physical system interact in a mutually beneficial manner. In this paper, we describe our work in developing a prototype proof-of-concept symbiotic simulation system that employs software agents in the monitoring, optimization and control of a semiconductor assembly and test operation.

Investment in capacity expansion remains one of the most critical decisions for a manufacturing organisation with global production facilities. Multiple factors need to be considered making the decision process very complicated. The purpose of this paper is to establish the state-of-the-art in multi-factor models for capacity expansion in manufacturing plants and networks. A three phase research programme is presented consisting of an extensive literature review and a structured assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the current research. The study found that there is a substantial amount of work on development of mathematical multi-factor models for capacity expansion. Despite that, no single work captures all the different facets of the problem.

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