Predictive Control of Inventory Management in Supply Chain Systems with Uncertain Demands and Time Delays

This paper establishes a predictive control strategy for inventory management in a supply chain system with uncertain demands and time delays. A discrete-time dynamic model with some realistic constraints is proposed by characterizing a general supply chain system with a graph representation. Due to the mismatching between the goods quantity obtained from suppliers and the ordered one and it may lead to stockouts and lower degree of customer satisfaction. A predictive control strategy is well presented to obtain recent demands so that suppliers can make decisions according to their own stock levels on time. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is verified by a a numerical example.