MODELING AND SIMULATION OF ANT COLONY'S LABOR DIVISION WITH CONSTRAINTS FOR TASK ALLOCATION OF RESILIENT SUPPLY CHAINS

Abstract

Emergency incidents increase the uncertainty of supply chain environment, and also make the supply chain vulnerability expose. Creating resilient supply chain is an effective way to overcome the supply chain vulnerability. The supply chain characteristics of self-adaptation and self-coordination are consistent with the self-organization feature of ant colony's labor division. In this paper, a generalized ant colony's labor division model with constraints is provided, which is used to construct the ant colony's labor division model with constraints of resilient supply chain to solve task allocation of resilient supply chains. The simulation principle and algorithm of resilient supply chain are provided based on the proposed model and task allocation of the supply chain is analyzed from the five aspects, that is, task allocation status, supply chain coordination, emergency incidents' impact to task allocation, task allocation rate and the influence of different incidents for task allocation. The simulation results show that, with the proposed model, it is effective to allocate resilient supply chain tasks and has excellent performance, such as faster response and robustness.