driving customers to seek alternatives, resulting in future lost sales. Therefore, firms are embracing

technologies like IoT and RFID to gather data and facilitate more efficient sharing, resulting in improved

information and material flow. Data sharing boosts visibility, hence fostering collaboration among supply chain

partners. Certain studies in the literature have employed IoT and RFID technology to enhance inventory

visibility, while others opt to share the gathered data with their partners to improve inventory replenishment

efficiency. Nevertheless, this paper presents an autonomous inventory replenishment system that utilizes IoT

technologies to replenish inventory through real-time visibility and collaboration. The system facilitates the

sharing of real-time data, such as inventory levels, with supply chain partners. Additionally, it enables

automatic collaboration by allowing partners to take action based on the shared data, such as activating orders

to replenish inventories at various points in the supply chain. To assess the suggested approach, we conducted

Key-Words: - Supply chain, IoT, RFID, inventory replenishment, visibility, collaboration.

Received: May 16, 2023. Revised: December 18, 2023. Accepted: January 14, 2023. Published: February 22, 2024.

1 Introduction

A supply chain consists of many organizations, [1],

working together in a collaborative setting to satisfy

customers’ demands. To enhance collaboration,

visibility needs to be improved. To this end, RFID

overview of material flows within complex supply

chains, [4], [5], [6]. According to [7], there are three

basic "tiers" or levels of supply chain visibility in

general:

reason, in this paper, we focus on inventory

replenishment as a measure of how visibility and

collaboration enhance supply chain performance. In

the literature, higher technology adoption is related

to better inventory replenishment. The longer it

takes for a store to realize that the stock level of a

eliminates all these times by showing real-time

inventory levels and triggering automatic orders that

are accepted and fulfilled right away throughout the

supply chain, guided by a set of rules that the supply

chain partners agreed upon. Theoretically, the

system eliminates the time to obtain the information

(by monitoring inventory in real-time), to make the

decision (decide what product to order and how

much), and to act based on the decision made

(submit the order, accept it, and fulfill it without

works. In the third section, we present the system

architecture and modules. In the fourth section, we

present the simulation and results. Finally, in the last

section, we give a conclusion to the conducted

work.

between the prior and the proposed system, it is

imperative to first grasp the fundamental stages

involved in an inventory replenishment operation.

The timing of these steps is contingent upon the

technology employed and the extent of visibility and

coordination among supply chain participants. The

greater the level of automation in a system, the

faster the inventory replenishment process will be.

The specific durations for each stage are listed in

Table 1.

attempt to optimize the inventory replenishment

process, it is still outperformed by the proposed

system as it eliminates all 8-time durations.

technology to track and replenish consumables in

customers’ home appliances like coffee machines

directed to consumers, it is the most similar to the

proposed system in the literature up to date. In

comparison to the proposed system, this system

eliminates all time durations in Table 1 except the

last one, while the proposed system eliminates all of

them.

previous systems and the proposed system in terms

of inventory replenishment steps optimization.

products. Manufacturing lines consist of a series of

inventory and work posts. At each inventory (raw

materials, work in progress, and finished goods) and

each work post, one or more RFID readers are

placed to read the tagged materials flowing in and

out of the inventory or work post. This results in

3.3.1 Inventory Consumption Analytics Module

This module, which is used at each inventory within

the supply chain, is responsible for tracking

The term "purchases" denotes the total cost of

merchandise that the business purchased during the

specified period, including both direct.

Fig. 5: The inventory consumption algorithm

place automatic orders, prepare merchandise, and

transport. To operate, this mode needs to calculate

the inventory threshold on which an order for a

product is placed. To do this, the system calculates

how much time the remaining inventory will take to

drain based on the current inventory draining speed.

To explain how this module works, we consider the

Figure 2 supply chain model. When, for example,

the retail store’s product’s inventory level reaches a

certain threshold, which can be defined by the user

as well as between the warehouse and the retail

store. The transport provider, who is a part of the

collaborative system, makes transport available

when goods are ready to ship. The transport

provider is notified beforehand so that the time

between transport availability and merchandise

readiness is minimal. In the beginning, this module

uses an estimated order preparation time. Afterward,

it uses the average order preparation time, which is

deducted from the list of order preparation times

the volume of the merchandise, the time the

Fig. 9: Packing time tracking

Users can be either system administrators,

managers, team leaders, or operators. The interface

displayed for each type of user is different

depending on their roles and privileges. System

access is granted following authentication.

Administrators have reading, writing, and system-

modifying privileges. Managers can access process-

related information.

4 Simulation and Results

results for each work are specific to its approach, its

objectives, the model of supply chain considered,

and the data used, which is in some cases

undisclosed. That is why, to compare the previous

systems with the proposed system, we first define

the supply model as the one shown in Figure 3, and

then we estimate, with the help of a time grid, how

much time each inventory replenishment step would

take. This allows us to have an estimate of how

much time each system would take to replenish