A Flexible Control Strategy for Dynamic Supply Chain Management

The dynamics and uncertainty of the business and the market makes difficult to coordinate the activities of a supply chain. Therefore, it is important to review systematically and to take into account the control strategy in order to manage a supply chain network. Model predictive control (MPC) is a well-known technique used in industry to optimally control dynamical processes. MPC is presented in this paper as the basis for a flexible control strategy for dynamic supply chain in transistor manufacturing. A Type II filter is designed to attenuate the integrating noise such as that exhibited by unforecasted customer demand. The selection of the filter gain provides the flexibility to achieve better performance and robustness. The advantages of this flexible MPC strategy are demonstrated through case studies of a representative supply chain problem in transistor manufacturing which involve scenarios of customer demand forecast error and anticipated periodic demand.