Understanding The Beer Distribution Game

The Beer Distribution Game was originally developed at MIT in the 1950s to illustrate how difficult it is to manage dynamic systems – in this case, the dynamic system is a supply chain that delivers beer from a brewery to the end consumer. What makes the game so intriguing is that the structure of the supply chain and the rules of the game are simple, yet the resulting behavior is quite complex.

You can play the game at beergame.transentis.com. In this meetup, we analyzed the dynamic structure of the supply chain that is featured in the beer distribution game and built a simulation model for it using the Business Prototyping Toolkit (BPTK). Using this simulation model we then investigated the supply chain management policies needed to keep the supply chain under control and play the game well.

You can find the Jupyter Notebook that we discussed during the meetup on our GitHub Repository.

If you missed the event, you can watch a live recording here:

You can find recordings and materials from past meetups on our meetup homepage.