A DECENTRALIZED INVENTORY CONTROL POLICY FOR SUPPLY CHAINS

The paper proposes a linear model with distributed delays to describe a multistage supply chain. The product structure determines the organisation of the network of enterprises that cooperate to manufacture end-products from raw materials. Autonomy of production units imposes structural constraints to the production and inventory policy. For the long-term time-horizon, an optimal global state feedback control policy is proposed to meet stationary stochastic demands for end-products. It is shown that this policy naturally satisfies the structural constraints of the decentralized problem and reduces to a sequence of local base-stock policies. This policy is then naturally extended to the short-term time-horizon with the objectives of reaching a target set while meeting the demand and respecting the constraints.