Successful supply chains management has become a key factor for enterprises to achieve and maintain their competitive advantage. The increasing complexity and agility of supply chains are sustainably growing challenges. Simulation provides advantages over traditional analytical methods in planning and optimisation of supply chains. This paper presents a comprehensive framework for the modelling and simulation of supply chains. A graph-driven methodology is adopted considering supply chains as "Big Graphs". The research will utilise semantic networks, and develop a supply chain ontology to construct semantic-based models of supply chains. The framework proposes the use of graph databases for storing and maintaining complex supply chain models and ontologies. Furthermore, the framework will provide automatic generation of simulation models to help non-simulation experts. The applicability and validity of the proposed framework will be investigated within a case study of healthcare supply chains, during which a specific ontology for healthcare supply chains will be produced as well.
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