A Study on Complexity in Supply Chain Problems: An MRP Application Case Study

One of the main reasons on having an inefficient supply chains is resulted on a chaos phenomena which occurs at the beginning of the chain. such chaos called bullwhip often continues to turbulence the whole system from the very beginning till the end and normally increases the complexity of the supply chain. in this paper we study the impact of chaos and bullwhip on supply chains where planning is based on material requirement planning (mrp). many auto industry part suppliers are normally involved in such difficulties. we propose a mathematical model in order to study the effects of the resulted problem and measuring the complexity by lyapunov exponent.