Abstract—Supply chain, as an effective strategiesparticipating in the intense business competition, has been accepted by scoresof enterprises, but how to evaluate its performance properly is still an issue.Basedon complexadaptive system(CAS) & emergence, this paperinvestigates the complex adaptive features and emergency dynamism of supply chain system and innovativelyproposesa new method toassess the performance of supply chain.

Keywords- Complex Adaptive System(CAS);Emergence; Supply Chain System; Performance Evaluation
                                                                                                                                                             I. Introduction

John Henry Holland^[1] defined ComplexAdaptive System（CAS）as “a dynamic network of many agents (which may represent cells,species, individuals, firms, nations) acting in parallel, constantly acting andreacting to what the other agents are doing” . Gell-Mann^[2] considered CAS as an open system which canrecognize regularities in its dynamic process and has the ability to learn. Theterm “emergent” was coined by the pioneer psychologist Lewes^[3], who wrote,“Every resultant is either a sum or a difference of theco-operant forces; their sum, when their directions are the same - theirdifference, when their directions are contrary”. Goldstein^[4] defined emergence as: “the arising of novel andcoherent structures, patterns and properties during the process ofself-organization in complex systems”. Goldstein’s definition can be furtherelaborated to describe the qualities of this definition in more detailby Peter^[5].“The commoncharacteristics are: (1) radical novelty (features not previously observed insystems); (2) coherence or correlation (meaning integrated wholes that maintainthemselves over some period of time); (3) A global or macro “level” (i.e. thereis some property of “wholeness”); (4) it is the product of a dynamical process(it evolves); and (5) it is “ostensive” - it can be perceived. For goodmeasure, Goldstein throws in supervenience- downward causation.” 

 “A supply chain is a system of organizations,people, technology, activities, information and resources involved in moving aproduct or service from supplier to customer (from Wikipedia).” Because of thecomplex structure of supply chain system, it is difficult to evaluate theperformance. Lummus el al.^[6] believed performance ofsupply chain should be evaluated in 4 aspects – supply, process management,delivery and demand management. Beamon^[7] pointed out evaluationindexes of a supply chain performance system can be classifiedin two groups – qualitative ones and quantitative ones. Roger^[8] consideredsupply chain system should be evaluated through the following aspects:tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, competence, courtesy, credibility,security, access, communication and understanding of consumers. In general,because most researchers treat supply chain as a simple system, few evaluationsystems could assess performance without bias. In fact, supply chain should be considered as a complex adaptive system(CAS), in which it is not only material flow, but alsoinformation flow that makes the system more dynamic and unpredictable,this is called   theemergency of  supply chainsystem. The purpose of this paper is to construct a quantitativemodel for performanceevaluation of supplychain based on CAS & emergence.