A joint control framework for supply chain planning
چکیده
The dynamics and uncertainty of the business and the market makes difficult to coordinate the activities of a supply chain (SC) and its echelons causing deviations from previous plans and schedules. Therefore, it is important to review systematically and to take into account the variability in the planning formulation in order to manage a plant or supply chain efficiently. These actions will permit to provide a more agile response to the market changes with more accurate decisions, improving by this means the overall performance of the business. In the literature, a control oriented decision framework has been proposed to carry out the review process. Specifically, model predictive control (MPC) is presented as a way to manage SC in the presence of uncertainty by incorporating the most recent information of the external market and internal business into the planning process. From another standpoint, an additional approach presented as a robust manner of decision making under uncertainty is solving the planning problem using stochastic optimisation. The main aim of this work is to analyse the consequences of implementing a MPC that comprises into the control algorithm a stochastic optimisation model. The potential of this approach is highlighted through a case study, in which the presented methodology is compared to the solely utilisation of MPC.