Principal Investigator Abel Sanchez
In order to explore the implications of various approaches to granularity, security, and alternative pedigree models, a pharmaceutical Supply Chain simulator was developed. The simulator is composed of N supply chain tiers, such as Manufacturer, Wholesaler or Retailer, where each tier may have an arbitrary number of facilities. Each facility is modeled as a state machine running in its own thread of execution. Just like the links in a metal chain the members of a supply chain may only have business relationships with their immediate neighbors. They may or may not know about more distant members of the chain and even if they are aware of their existence they may not have a business relationship with them. The supply chain functions by executing business events between trading partners. One party initiates an event by sending a message to the other party, such as a Purchase Order (P.O. message). The state of a facility is determined by the number of Purchase Orders it has pending and how much stock it has accumulated in its Warehouse. The simulation is driven by Purchase Orders that are submitted “upstream” by the retail tier. Goods are manufactured in response to purchase orders and are shipped “downstream”. Initial results show the simulator is capable of modeling 100,000 facilities and 100 million items of product being injected into the system per day. The load on the registry can vary by a factor of over 1000 in peak to average load with around 200 messages per second being the peak load for a 1 million per day flow.