Linking E-commerce to logistics simulation: Visiones, the missing chain

This paper presents the design, development and application of a simulation-based methodology dedicated to the assessment of 13213 e-commerce introduction within manufacturing systems. A two-stage approach is presented: the first stage aims at predicting the evolution of the e-commerce activities through the identification of electronic market characteristics and their possible evolution scenarios. The second stage is dedicated to the evaluation of logistic performances of industrial systems by means of discrete event modelling and simulation. The proposed approach has been developed, tested and integrated in a commercial software named VISIONeS. In this paper, the methodology is pointed out, highlighting the benefits of the approach supported by the VISIONeS decision support software. The model structure and the features of the latter are presented with brief implementation results.