Queueing networks and the topological design of supply chain systems

Manufacturing firms are linking their internal processes to external suppliers and customers. The resulting supply chain is often a very large network of activities and resources. Modeling and optimization of such complex systems is a new area of research for which exact analytical results are obviously very difficult if not impossible. We develop a methodology based on analytical queueing networks coupled with nonlinear optimization to design supply chain topologies and evaluate various performance measures. The results obtained from small network configurations as well as from the case study discussed in the paper demonstrate that our approach is a very useful tool to analyze congestion problems and to evaluate the performance of the network topologies.