Optimising supply chain management using robust control synthesis

Abstract

The inventory management of supply chain is concerned with an efficient transportation of materials and products through supply chain members. In this paper, a series of linear models have been presented with lag time uncertainty for improving inventory management. In addition, a fluid analogy has been used for a single-product manufacturing system, or the basic unit of a supply chain. Robust control synthesis, which has been proven to cope with its ability for the system with high uncertainty, is utilised in optimising the inventory management and guaranteeing high performance of complete system. In addition, this control scheme aims to ensure the customer satisfaction by tracking and keeping the actual inventory close to target inventory under the influence of uncertainty. The extensive numerical simulations have been carried out to validate the proposed approach against disturbances. Finally, the simulation results show that the robust control system ensures good ability on keeping the target inventory under uncertainty.