A Simulation for Supply Chains Contract Execution

Supply chains exhibit complex dynamics and intricate dependencies among their components, whose understanding is crucial for addressing the challenges highlighted by recent global disruptions. This paper presents a novel multi-agent system designed to simulate supply chains, linking reasoning about dynamic domains and multi-agent systems to reasoning about the high-level primitives of the NIST CPS Framework. Our approach synthesizes existing research on supply chain formalization and integrates these insights with multi-agent techniques, employing a declarative approach to model interactions and dependencies. The simulation framework models a set of autonomous agents within a partially observable environment, and whose interactions are dictated by contracts. The system dynamically reconciles agents' actions, assessing their feasibility and consequences. Based on the state of the domain, the simulation framework also draws conclusions about the high-level notions of requirements and concerns of the NIST CPS Framework, which provide a uniform and domain-agnostic vocabulary for the understanding of such complex systems as supply chains.