Analysis of dynamic decision making underpinning supply chain resilience: A serious game approach

This paper proposes a serious game approach using the ColPMan game to analyze the dynamic decision-making process underpinning supply chain resilience. In this approach, a newly developed serious game named ColPMan is used. The players operate a virtual supply chain of a large-scale make-to-order company by making its production and delivery decisions. The game generates decision logs and contents of conversations among the players, which are then analyzed with a protocol analysis method, which treats communicative interactions observed in the game session as collaborative efforts to find and solve problems. The virtual supply chain in the game is composed of a headquarters accepting orders from customers, an upstream factory producing materials, and three downstream factories processing materials into products. Each player is assigned to one of the sites and makes its production and delivery plans. The game probabilistically incorporates both stationary and non-stationary environmental disturbances, such as lead-time variations, defective materials and products, and machine breakdowns. The players aim to maximize the profits of the whole supply chain. Since operations at the different sites of the chain are related, the players should learn to create a shared strategy and act in coordination to manage disturbances to obtain a high score. The proposed approach is tested through experiments with different scenarios of environmental disturbances. The experimental results confirm how the players tend to develop discussion and share awareness of the stationary and/or non-stationary disturbances in their group decision-making process.