ABSTRACT
From the mid-1990s, Cisco's network strategy used the Internet to create interactive relationships, linking employees, partners, suppliers, and customers together. The links enabled Cisco itself to concentrate on product design, while other tasks were outsourced to suppliers and contract manufacturers. This chapter discusses the traditional supply chain (SC) in terms of the flow of decisions, information, and materials, leading to the trifurcation of SC networks into mutually separable decision networks, information networks, and logistics networks. In relation to decision networks, it also discusses two types of modeling techniques for problems with one or many decisions: decision trees and influence diagrams. As in the case of probabilistic models, these techniques take advantage of the dependency structure of the problem to have a more compact representation and a more efficient evaluation. The chapter presents a brief introduction to Influence diagrams (IDs), including their representation and basic inference techniques.
