Agent-based supply chain management—2: a refinery application

The refinery business involves tasks that span several departments and process large amount of data. Among others, these include crude procurement, logistics and scheduling (storage, distillation units, etc.). Current refinery decision support systems (DSSs) fail to integrate all the decision-making processes of a refinery, to interface with other systems in place, to incorporate dynamic data from various sources and to assist different departments concurrently. In part 1 of this two-part paper, we proposed an agent-based framework for supply chain DSSs. Here, we demonstrate its application through a prototype DSS, called petroleum refinery integrated supply chain modeler and simulator or PRISMS, for crude procurement. PRISMS serves as a central DSS through which all processes of a refinery can be studied and enables integrated decisions with respect to the overall refinery business. In particular, PRISMS can be used to study the effects of internal policies of the refinery and its various departments. We illustrate this through three detailed ‘what-if’ studies that provide an insight into how the business responds to changes in policies, exogenous events and plant modifications.