Proposed and developed is a framework and an extensible
library of simulation modeling components for strategic
sourcing and transportation. The components include
items, suppliers, volume-discount schedules, aggregators,
procurement rules, and less-than-truck-load delivery. Service
models are classes in the Java programming language
extended with decision variables, assertions, and business
objective constructs. The optimization semantics of the
framework is based on finding an instantiation of real
values into the decision variables in the service object
constructor, that satisfies all the assertions and leads to the
optimal business objective. The optimization is not done
by repeated simulation runs, but rather by automatic compilation
of the simulation model in Java into a mathematical
programming model in AMPL and solving it using an
external solver.