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Intelligent model design of complex system becomes a key issue for organization responsiveness to uncertainties. In the real business world, the rule of competition between one firm verse another is replaced by a chain verse another chain, the cooperation is the same, where does it occur? At industrial cluster, there are a multiple of rivals or potential competitors for each member of value chain, industrial cluster location not only contains a couple of focal firms locating at the same tier, but includes the corresponding upstream and downstream firms as well, all of which concentrate on a close geographical site. For adopting to ever-changing market and sever competition, it is most likely to form multiple paralleled single supply chains for each focal firm of industrial cluster, these paralleled single supply chains compete and cooperate with each other. Recent researches regarding supply chain design mainly focus on a limited tier in single supply chain, which only take into account vertical cooperation and ignore the across-chain horizontal one. This paper, based on cluster supply chain, provides a novel framework and approach to design cluster supply chain without across-chain horizontal cooperation, then by introducing item allocation proportion of vertical and horizontal cooperation (α: 1−α), the cluster supply chain design with across-chain horizontal cooperation is developed, then presents a hybrid method to find solution, at last, computational study is presented to investigate values of decision variables and their influence on cluster supply chain design.

Owing to its inherent modeling flexibility, simulation is often regarded as the proper means for supporting decision making on supply chain management. The ultimate success of CSC (cluster supply chain), however, is determined by a combination of the analyst's skills, the chain members' involvement, and the modeling capabilities of the simulation tool. In this paper, a distributed simulation framework is presented to facilitate collaborative cluster supply chains simulation. This integrated framework is meant to construct a cross-chain simulation while hiding model details within the enterprises. This can be realized by building the simulation components as web service agents on top of the Runtime Infrastructure of the HLA (High level Architecture) and integrating simulation application on top of SOA (Web Service-Oriented Architecture).

Increased global competition and demand for greater product variety result in the emergence of dynamic supply chain, which need to be co-operated without sacrificing their flexibility. Traditional application systems such as ERP, lack the autonomy and flexibility required by dynamic network. EDI is costly and EDI interfaces miss the decision values and logistic control required for supply chain management. Given the limitations of EDI application and traditional application system, this paper is aimed at exploring a new adaptable software architecture to realize enterprise application integration across organizational network. The functional structure and service platform of a software component architecture in the supply chain management are presented. Due to the simple and low-cost method provided for information communication and sharing by Web Services, we select Web Services as our implementation technology of the software component architecture. The integral management in the architecture is executed by supply chain engines (SCEs). The SCEs manage integrated business processes intelligently and flexibly as required for dynamic supply chain. A web-service-based system architecture is proposed for the communication of the run-time data of tasks among processes in heterogeneous environments, and a prototype of the system implemented is presented.

In order to explore the impact of upstream structural on supply chain design, Taking into consideration that the relationship between bill of material (BOM) and multi-hierarchical suppliers, based on the supply chain design with single supply hub model, this paper extended to establish supply chain design models with two supply hubs from the model with single Supply Hub. These mixed integer programming (MIP) models were computed by using combined genetic algorithm. The experiment found that the total cost and inventory level of supply chain design with two supply hubs were lower than those with single supply hub, and could restrain ‘Bullwhip effect’ more efficiently than that without supply hub.

Inventory management in cluster supply chains is a new organization mode. A hybrid control method is applied to solve the complex multi-modes issues. The different control strategies on variable stock condition in supply chains are discussed in details. By simulation cases, the paper presents the procedure of directing the optimal decision variables. The results proves the bullwhip effect in cluster supply chains can be weaken and the order fluctuation tends to be easily stable by exerting hybrid control and across-chain inventory cooperation.

Uncertainties inherent in customer demands make it difficult for mobile supply chains to achieve JIT inventory replenishment, resulting in loosing sales opportunities or keeping excessive chain-wide inventories. In this paper, we propose a inventory-control model for a mobile supply chain through using a reinforcement learning technique, the control parameters are designed to change as customer demand patterns changes, A simulation-based experiment was performed to investigate the performance of the inventory control model.

Uncertainty in operation process of cluster supply chain raises the issue of flexibility, where the supply lead-time and demand quantity are the two most common changes occurring in cluster supply chain. Focusing on the flexibility of cluster supply chain, the fuzzy set theory was applied to give the representation for the variables, and model the cluster supply chain flexibility. Besides it, a supplier selection method was developed. Finally, an illustrative example was given for demonstration.

With the development of economic globalization, China is becoming one of the most important world manufacture center. Act as an industrial platform, industrial cluster plays a crucial role and is gradually evolving into a kind of industrial environment in China manufacturing sectors. This paper, from the supply chain perspective, coins a new term 'cluster supply chain' that refer to industrial cluster and tries to explore its systematic structure. And we found, in the process of production, implementation of mass customization in cluster supply chain is more effective and more efficient and easier than in a single supply chain due to its unique driving model (2P&2BP: pull/push/burst power/bottleneck press) rather than conventional pull\push model, under which circumstances, SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) in industrial cluster would have chances to extensively participate cooperate with core companies in the form of supply chain, thus changing overriding views that implementation of supply chain management is a patent for big companies