Inventory Control in Supply Chain: a Model-Free Approach*

Abstract

Inventory control in the frame of supply chain systems represents a challenging problem due to their dynamical behavior, ranging from fast changing demand, transport and delivery delays and production phenomena like bullwhip effect. Nevertheless, modeling such systems in order to capture all its components and to design a robust and dynamic management, remains an open problem. In this paper, a model-free control which permits to design several control strategies without need to any exact model, is proposed. Several numerical simulations as well as the conducted comparative studies show the relevance of the proposed approach. In addition, the paper considers the case of a poor knowledge of the supply chain model and introduce an exact and fast deterministic method which is of a algebraic flavor in order to estimate the parameters of the model.