Supply Chain Optimization
Assembly Line
Your supplier’s supplier is not your supplier – Graph learning for transparency in deep-tier supply networks
Early graph neural networks have been applied to supply network data, but these are not as accurate as they could be because they focus only on supplier-buyer relationships and assume each company only produces one type of product. As a result, most companies with various types of products still lack visibility into risks involving deep-tier suppliers.
In this blog, we propose a graph representation learning method that models supply networks as heterogeneous graphs. The benefit of this model is that it can depict multiple relationships between companies and products, thus exposing the deep-tier supplier risk of companies with multiple products.
For companies within increasingly complicated supply networks, risk exposure extends far beyond direct suppliers. However, most companies lack risk transparency into their deep-tier supply networks because the supplier of their supplier is not their deep-tier supplier.
Multi-agent deep reinforcement learning for multi-echelon supply chain optimization
In this article, we explore how the problem can be approached from the reinforcement learning (RL) perspective that generally allows for replacing a handcrafted optimization model with a generic learning algorithm paired with a stochastic supply network simulator. We start by building a simple simulation environment that includes suppliers, factories, warehouses, and retailers, as depicted in the animation below; we then develop a deep RL model that learns how to optimize inventory and pricing decisions.
Our first step is to develop an environment that can be used to train supply chain management policies using deep RL. We choose to create a relatively small-scale model with just a few products and facilities but implement a relatively rich set of features including transportation, pricing, and competition. This environment can be viewed as a foundational framework that can be extended and/or adapted in many ways to study various problem formulations. Henceforth, we refer to this environment as the World of Supply (WoS).