Decision making in logistics: a chaos theory based analysis

Logistics in general is a complex system. In this paper we investigate the existence of chaos in logistics systems. Such an investigation is necessary to use appropriate and correct methods for further analysis, as linear systems techniques will not be useful. If a system exhibits chaos, decision making should consider the system characterization parameters from a chaos theory perspective. In this paper, three models from the existing literature are reported. Of these models, the non-preemptive queuing model is considered for further exploration. A prototypical supply chain example is used and the resulting behavior is characterized. At certain input values the behavior of the logistics system exhibits chaos. Thi