Dynamic Modeling and Effective Inventory Management for Uncertain Perishable Supply Chains with non Synchronized Internal Dynamics

The problem we consider is to define an efficient management strategy for a periodic-review production-inventory system whose dynamics is characterized by various elements of complexity. These elements characterize the vast majority of practical situations and consist of: 1) perishable goods with unknown deterioration rate, 2) an uncertain future customer demand with oscillations that are not statistically modelable, 3) non-synchronized operations of goods stocking and dispatching inside each review period. With reference to this problem we define a general model of supply chain dynamics capturing the mentioned complex features and encompassing, as particular cases, other models proposed in the literature. We also provide a coherent two criteria based evaluation of the Bullwhip Effect (BE) and a Replenishment Policy (RP) resulting from a min-max formulation of Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach. The RP maximizes the satisfied customer demand and contains the BE within precise limits independent of the customer demand randomness.