Availability Analysis and Evaluation of Flexible Supply Chain System

As complexity and demand for new products grow, companies are realizing that their supply chains need to be more flexible. Currently, in supply chain system, users´ reliance has driven a universal user expectation that all the information be readily availability whenever and wherever they want. Evaluating and thinking about managing such availability are therefore becoming one of the important factors to improve the performance of the supply chain system. So, how to effectively analyze and evaluate service availability of supply chain system is a challenging problem for investigators. In this paper, the architecture of web-based services of flexible supply chain system is interpreted elaborately, and then an imperfect coverage service model for this system is designed and analyzed exhaustively. The result achieved from this model can help designers find the right tradeoffs for achieving availability of users required while providing acceptable levels of performance.