Paper Title
Blockchain Enabled Demand Information Sharing to Mitigate the Bullwhip Effect: An Agent-based Modeling and Simulation

Abstract
Supply chain inefficiencies often stem from distorted information when shared across supply chain echelons, resulting in amplified order quantities as one moves up the supply chain. This phenomenon is called the bullwhip effect which causes several challenges in the supply chain such as excessive inventory levels, exacerbated costs, and poor customer service. In this paper, we investigate how block chain technology characteristics could enhances transparent, secure, and immutable customer demand information sharing, thus mitigate the bullwhip effect. For this purpose, agent-based simulation approach is used to model a serial supply chain: customer, retailer, wholesaler, producer, and a supplier with heterogeneous lead times, safety stocks, and exponential smoothing factors. The proposed decentralized model reforms the sequential information sharing process in traditional supply chains and reduces information distortion through enabling full visibility of the same customer demand information by upstream echelons. The inherited features of block chain: decentralization, cryptography, smart contracts and information immutability shows the potential to mitigates the bullwhip effect and serves as an enabler in reshaping supply chain dynamics as the findings show. Keywords – Block chain, Supply Chain, Information Sharing, Bullwhip Effect, Agent-Based Modeling, Decentralization, Inter-organizational Coordination, Simulation.