When a customer region has a demand for a quantity of an oil product, it is in general possible to meet the demand using a number of equivalent products. Many factors influence the proportions of component products that are combined to make an optimal supply chain decision. The factors include the season of the year, the locations of available equivalent products, and the availability of suitable and timely transportation.
A competitive supply chain plan depends on knowledge of the above factors, on business policy knowledge, and on inventory facts in SQL databases. Both the knowledge and the facts can change rapidly. This makes it difficult to write conventional application programs and SQL queries that can produce supply chain plans to meet demand profitably.
We show how the knowledge needed to satisfy a target region demand can be written down in the form of business rules in open vocabulary, executable English. We use some new technology to execute the rules directly as though they were a program. The technology automatically generates and runs SQL queries to produce a suggested supply chain solution. Even in simple examples, the generated SQL queries are too complex for a programmer to write reliably. However, it is easy to change the business rules to specify a new policy, and the generated SQL then changes automatically. A feature of the technology is that a supply chain solution can be explained, at the business level, in hypertexted English.
The next section describes a supply chain example. Section 3 shows how the knowledge for finding a competitive supply chain plan can be written as business rules in executable English, and provides some small sample data tables. Section 4 shows how the rules are run over the sample data in a file to produce a supply chain solution, and to produce an English explanation of how the solution was calculated. In general, the approach in Section 4 would not scale up for large tables of data. In Section 5, we show how the rules can be used to automatically generate and run SQL queries that would be too complex for a programmer to write reliably. The resulting supply chain solution and explanation is the same as for the non-SQL approach in Section 4. We conclude that English business rules that can easily be changed, and that are used to generate and run SQL automatically, have the potential to increase the efficiency and competitiveness of supply chains in the oil industry.
Download
PDF Ebook Oil Industry Supply Chain Management Using English Business Rules Over SQL
