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

In this paper, an Internal Model Control (IMC) scheme is incorporated in production inventory control systems in a complete supply chain. This control scheme presents a good target inventory tracking under the perfect knowledge of the system. Furthermore, the inventory tracking and load disturbance rejection control problems can be tackled separately. However, the closed‐loop performance of the IMC scheme may be degraded due to a mismatch between the modelled and actual delay or to the fact that delays may be time‐varying. Thus, the IMC control scheme is enhanced in this work with a novel method for the online identification of lead times based on a multimodel scheme. In this way, all benefits of the IMC scheme can be exploited. A detailed discussion of the proposed production inventory system is provided including a stability and performance analysis as well as the identification capabilities of the algorithm. Several simulation examples illustrate the efficiency of the approach.