Robust control of production-distribution systems

A class of production-distribution problems with unknown-but-bounded uncertain demand is considered. At each time, the demand is unknown but each of its components is assumed to belong to an assigned interval. Furthermore, the system has production and transportation capacity constraints. We face the problem of finding a control strategy that keeps the storage levels bounded. We also deal with the case in which storage level bounds are assigned and the controller must keep the state within these bounds. Both discrete and continuous time models are considered. We provide basic necessary and sufficient conditions fur the existence of such strategies. We propose several possible feedback control laws which are robust with respect to link failures and/or network parameter variations. We finally consider the case of processing/transportation delays.