Model-Free Control Policies for Inventory Management in Supply Chain

Abstract

In the frame of supply chain networks, several approaches stemming from control theory seem to be more adapted to deal with dynamic inventory management. Nevertheless, the used methods, until today, are model-based control strategies where supply chain models play a major role. Due to the increasing complexity of such systems, the modeling of supply chains becomes more difficult and fails to capture all the dynamic behavior of the supply chain networks. This paper proposes as an alternative to these approaches a model-free control method and its corresponding intelligent controllers for inventory control in supply chain. Several concrete numerical simulations and comparative studies mainly with the internal model control show the efficiency of the approach and promising future of the obtained results even in the presence of various disturbances.