Tactical and operational planning for manufacturing enterprises are more important today than ever before as their supply chains span the globe. Two state-of-the-art technologies that are critical to success are Discrete Event Simulation and Advanced Planning and Scheduling. They are commonly applied in designing and executing operations at each site within the supply chain. However, as supply chains become leaner and more responsive, operational constraints and stochastic influences within the

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... manufacturing sites and the logistics network require a combination of both technologies applied to the entire supply chain. This paper describes a novel framework for advanced distributed simulation with integrated APS procedures for collaborative supply chain optimization. The framework can be used for fast optimization of both planning procedures and execution policies and also provides a base for easy implementation of simulation results. A prototype of a distributed semiconductor supply chain simulation has been developed and is currently being refined.