Modelling and analysis of complexity in service systems

Complexity is a topic of interest nowadays and even still there is no consensus about the definition of it. This PhD study starts with building up a generic definition of the term and understanding the characteristics of the complexity. Aim of this study is to explain the complexity from retail supply chain perspective. Existing complexity literature for manufacturing systems and supply chains has been analyzed and a new classification scheme has been proposed. An important contribution of this research is the use of system dynamic modeling in a retail supply chain to derive insight about the dynamic behavior and to represent the complex interactions. Four different retail supply chain management scenarios have been simulated on system dynamics software STELLA. Using the new classification scheme for complexity and suggested performance metrics for the retail supply chain, a multi-perspective analysis has been performed on the system dynamics output. Complexity of the scenarios has been reviewed to investigate if the complexity is useful -so that increasing its performance and flexibility- or creating issues. The used complexity metrics also indicate the problematic areas in the system to be sorted out.