Application of Control Theoretic Tools to Supply Chain Disruptions Management

Supply chain disruptions management aims at real-time supply chain monitoring, alerting supply chain participants about deviations and possible disruptions as well as elaborating adjustment control actions. A basis for the alerting and disruption recovery is a tolerance area of execution parameters’ admissible deviations. Two important questions still remain open: (i) how to determine the borders of the tolerance area and (ii) what adjustments steps should be taken to overcome a disruption. In this paper, we propose to use dynamic robustness analysis on the basis of attainable sets and the adaptive adjustment on the basis of positional optimization as an integrated framework to extend existing techniques. We consider supply chain robustness as a dynamic supply chain property that emerges through controlled adaptability on the basis of feedback loops. With the results of this study, the borders of deviations’ sectors within the tolerance area can be determined. In each of these sectors, certain adjustment actions at different adaptation levels can be interrelated.