A Distributed Retail Beer Game for Decision Support System

A beer game is a simulation tool for the study of Supply Chain Management (SCM) issues used by the students of MIT. It has been augmented over the time to make it industry ready for decision making and risk management. Apart from smooth information and material flow among the distributed partners excess inventory is still an issue to control. In this paper, an attempt is made to improvise the Beer Game model to a Petri Net model for risk analysis and decision making. A successful simulation of the Petri Net model on efficient redistribution of stock towards inventory management is presented in this paper. The paper also establishes that the analysis is done in polynomial time.