Direct Neural Network Based Service Level Control in RFID-enabled Supply Chain

Abstract

Abstract In recent supply chain management, as the online use of inventory data becomes available with the development of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, it is now possible to monitor the performance measures in a timely fashion. Customer service level is a key performance measure that can be computed as the percentage of times that customer orders electronically received are fulfilled by on-hand inventory. Online monitoring of the service level enables the management paradigm to progress toward the closed loop based control which keeps revising the operation policy to reach a target service level. This paper proposes a closed loop supply chain control based on a direct neural network controller. Simulation based experiments were performed to test the performance of the controller against two kinds of unstable customer demand curves.