Simulation modelling and analysis of warehouse operations in a food grain supply chain

This paper deals with simulation modelling and analysis of operations at food grain warehouses owned by an Indian organisation. The organisation undertakes food grain transportation using rail wagons and the delay in unloading food grains at warehouses results in the incurrence of penalty cost called demurrage cost. A discrete event simulation model is developed using Arena to analyse the warehouse operations with a special focus on unloading. The simulation model is run using historical data collected from the organisation and performance measures such as resource utilisation, capacity utilisation and demurrage cost are ascertained to assess the efficiency of warehouses.