Title: Supply chain modelling and analysis: an application of Latin square to a repeated coupling of non-linear differential equations

Authors: Elena Ciancimino, Salvatore Cannella

Addresses: Faculty of Engineering, Department of Manufacturing, Industrial and Management Engineering, viale delle Scienze, Parco d'Orleans, Palermo 90128, Italy. ' Faculty of Engineering, Department of Manufacturing, Industrial and Management Engineering, viale delle Scienze, Parco d'Orleans, Palermo 90128, Italy

Abstract: In the last 50 years, Forrester|s system dynamics techniques have been adopted to analyse problems and find solutions for global supply chains. An important topic in production-inventory system modelling is the design of experiment. The aim of this paper is to present an application of a statistical technique of design of experiment, the Latin Square Design, to set a combination of input values for the initial-value problem of non-linear repeated coupling of first-order differential equations modelling a production-inventory system. This design permits to reduce the number of experiments while allowing statistical analysis for testing the significance of the studied parameters.

Keywords: multi-echelon supply chains; order policy; simulation; statistical analysis; boundary variation; design of experiments; DOE; supply chain modelling; Latin square design; nonlinear differential equations; supply chain management; SCM.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLSM.2011.041688

International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management, 2011 Vol.9 No.3, pp.268 - 279

Published online: 06 May 2015 *

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