Inventory control for the supply chain: An adaptive control approach based on the identification of the lead-time

► In this paper, the delay compensation Internal Model Control (IMC) scheme is incorporated in production inventory control systems in a complete supply chain. ► Since, in a real supply chain lead times may be unknown the system is complemented with a novel method for the online identification of lead time based on a multimodel scheme. Thus, all profits of the IMC scheme can be exploited. ► The convergence properties of the algorithm to the actual delay are proved and simulation examples have shown that the algorithm identifies the complete set of lead times of the supply chain timely improving the performance of the inventory control. ► Theoretical and practical proofs respect to Lead times identification, stability properties are provided.