Control of production-distribution systems with unknown inputs and system failures

In this paper we consider production-distribution systems with buffer and capacity constraints in the presence of uncertain inputs. We face the problem of finding a control which drives the buffer levels to a prescribed value. We consider a continuous-time model and we show that some important properties hold which fail in general in the discrete-time case. In particular we show that the case in which the controller knows the external input is "equivalent'" to the case in which such information is not available. Furthermore, a decentralized strategy can be determined. We also show that in the case of network failures the controller does not need to know the current network configuration in order to guarantee his tracking goal as long as a certain necessary and sufficient condition is satisfied.