Flexible module-based modeling and analysis for large-scale transportation-inventory systems

A method of modeling large-scale transportation-inventory systems is proposed as an attempt to describe the systems flexibly. Such a system has a lot of items that are ordered, transported, and stored at the warehouses of the distribution centers. The system consists of any required numbers of "sources" and "destinations" as the need arises to build a simulation model. The order by a destination is made toward the associated source, based on the inventory policy at the distribution center. A more flexible module-based method is proposed to generate simulation models for transportation-inventory systems and by adopting Excel VBA. The proposed method is applied to the actual system. It was found that the time to build simulation models could be drastically reduced. Furthermore, the proposed method was found to be both practical and powerful.