A Distributed Model Predictive Control Strategy for the Bullwhip Reducing Inventory Management Policy

Given the input/output constraints and cross couplings of supply chain (SC) nodes, model predictive control (MPC) is efficient to seek the optimal solutions to the problems posed by interacting nodes to satisfy customer demands. In supply chain applications, due to the growing spatial distribution and interactions between the supply network elements, the information flow management becomes a challenging yet significant task. To reduce numerical complexity while maintaining implementability, a distributed MPC strategy is proposed. The scheme aims at finding the Nash equilibrium where the controller of each subsystem communicates with other ones in the presence of noncooperative interaction and strong coupled inputs due to the ordering decisions. Extensive numerical simulations verify that the strategy outperforms conventional policies in terms of substantially reduced SC operating cost.