Heads Or Tails: A Framework To Model Supply Chain Heterogeneous Messages

Abstract

The electronic exchange of business documents between a customer and their trading partner use Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standards that incorporate various document types from purchase orders to shipping notices between engaging parties. Simulating the behaviour of EDI messages within a Supply Chain networks queuing system has many purposes from understanding the efficiency and effectiveness of queue behaviour leading to process re-engineering and queue optimisation stratification. These different types of EDI transactions are heterogeneous in nature and challenging to model. This research investigates whether a parametric or non-parametric approach is appropriate to model message service times (ST). Our results show that parametric distribution models are suitable for modelling the distributions tail, whilst non-parametric Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) models are ideal for modelling the head.

Keywords

• edi
• distribution
• heterogeneous