Modeling a supply chain using a network of queues

In this paper, a supply chain is represented as a two-input, three-stage queuing network. An input order to the supply chain is represented by two stochastic variables, one for the occurrence time and the other for the quantity of items to be delivered in each order. The objective of this paper is to compute the minimum response time for the delivery of items to the final destination along the three stages of the network. The average number of items that can be delivered with this minimum response time constitute the optimum capacity of the queuing network. After getting serviced by the last node (a queue and its server) in each stage of the queuing network, a decision is made to route the items to the appropriate node in the next stage which can produce the least response time. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.