Managing Inventory Level and Bullwhip Effect in Multi Stage Supply Chains with Perishable Goods: A New Distributed Model Predictive Control Approach

We consider the inventory control problem for multi stage Supply Chains (SC) whose dynamics is characterized by uncertainties on the perishability factor of stocked goods and on the customer forecast information. The control problem is to define a replenishment policy keeping the inventory level as close as possible to a desired value and mitigating the Bullwhip Effect (BE). The solution we propose is based on Distributed Robust Model Predictive Control (DRMPC) approach. This implies solving a constrained min-max optimization problem. To drastically reduce the numerical complexity of this problem, the control signal is parametrized using B-spline functions