Agent-based heuristics model for measuring customer disruption impact on production and inventory replenishment

Agent-based simulation approach in production and inventory environment is capable of responding and adapting to disruptions caused by customers’ changing requirements. The impacts of disruptions in production and inventory systems can be measured through learning and decision-making ability of system agents. In this paper, agent-based modelling integrated with heuristic optimisation approach is presented as embedded within a scheduling and rescheduling framework. The proposed approach is implemented in a disrupted OEMs parts manufacturing system. The integration of the framework modules in connection with inventory control helped production planners to manage disruptions by tracking order processing times and quantities and for performance measurement. The proposed approach is compared with the few existing related methods like the sequential method. The proposed approach not only revealed the impact of disruptions in terms of process times and order quantities but offered ‘available times’ which were applied for production support and inventory replenishment. This demonstrates a valuable and viable resolution strategy responding and adapting to disruptions caused by customers.