Differentiable Agent-Based Modeling for Multi-Echelon Supply Chains: Gradient-Based Optimization of Heterogeneous Policies at Scale

Bulent Soykan, Murtadha Alsayegh, Sean Mondesire, Ghaith Rabadi

Global supply chains rely on the interactions of thousands of heterogeneous agents, posing significant challenges for optimization. While traditional optimization often assumes homogeneity to ensure tractability, Reinforcement Learning struggles with sample inefficiency when scaling to high-dimensional state spaces. We propose a Differentiable Agent-Based Model for multi-echelon inventory management. By implementing stochastic dynamics via differentiable tensor operations, we enable direct gradient propagation through the simulation. We validate the framework by recovering theoretical Newsvendor optima without supervision. Crucially, we demonstrate ``Mass Personalization'' by optimizing 10,000 distinct agent policies simultaneously in seconds, achieving a 53% cost reduction compared to scalar baselines. Furthermore, we utilize gradient sensitivity analysis to generate causal heatmaps, accurately recovering inherent lead-time delays from the computation graph. This approach bridges the gap between simulation and optimization, enabling the efficient training of self-correcting Digital Twins.