Reverse simulation for collaborative commerce: A study of integrating object-oriented database technology with object-oriented simulator

Collaborative commerce has been used for communication, design, planning, information sharing, and information discovery in business-to-business applications. The collaboration between buyers and sellers enhances product quality and customer satisfaction. However, most effort currently focuses on information sharing with customers and suppliers instead of joint product development or manufacturing. Moreover, traditional analytical methods have limited capability in solving problems. This study presents a framework for doing reverse simulation, where designers can reuse past experiments and change system parameters in manufacturing system for collaborative commerce. The framework integrates the object-oriented simulator and the object-oriented database. In this framework, the object-oriented database records the whole experiment scenarios and allows multiple planners with different expertise to involve concurrently and collaboratively. Then, simulations of advanced planning and scheduling in a product manufacturing environment that involves several planners working collaboratively are used for demonstration.