Design, implementation and test of collaborative strategies in the supply chain

In general, game theory is used to analyze interactions formally described by an analytical model. In this paper, we describe a methodology to replace the analytical model by a simulation one in order to study more realistic situations. We use this methodology to study how the more-or-less selfishness of agents affects their behaviour. We illustrate our methodology with the case study of a wood supply chain, in which every company is seen as an agent which may use an ordering strategy designed to reduce a phenomenon called the bullwhip effect. To this end, we assume that every agent utility can be split in two parts, a first part representing the direct utility of agents (in practice, their inventory holding cost) and a second part representing agent social consciousness, i.e., their impact on the rest of the multi-agent system (in practice, their backorder cost). We find that company-agents often apply their collaborative strategy at whatever their same level of social consciousness. Our interpretation of this specific case study is that every company is so strongly related with one other, that all should collaborate in our supply chain model. Note that a previous paper outlined this methodology and detailed its application to supply chains; our focus is now on the presentation and the extension of the methodology, rather than on its application to supply chains.