Dynamic evaluation and simulation of variant-driven complexity costs in multi-echelon automotive supply chains
Haiyan Yi1, Dianjun Fang2
COMPUTER MODELLING & NEW TECHNOLOGIES 2014 18(5) 208-219
1School of Transportation and Logistics, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu City, Sichuan Province, China, 610031
2Chinese-German School for Postgraduate Studies, Tongji University, Shanghai City, China, 200092
The proliferation of product variety driven by part variants imposes a great impact on the costs, performance and ecological burden of automotive supply chains. Costs are always the first aspect to be considered by manufacturers. This paper creates a multi-echelon automotive supply chain in the light of the process model and improves the KPI of low costs to evaluate the variant-driven complexity costs. Then, the evaluation models of different complexity costs are constructed. An automotive supply chain scenario model is constructed with the OTD-NET and the simulation results are analysed. The study of this paper will be helpful to automotive manufacturing in seeking to optimize the number and range of product variants.