Process control education using inventory management in supply chains

Abstract Supply chain management (SCM) is concerned with the efficient movement of goods through a network of suppliers and retailers. Effective SCM represents a crucial imperative for all modern, global enterprises. As delayed and uncertain dynamical systems, supply chains provide an excellent opportunity for demonstrating the benefits of control principles to what is traditionally perceived as a “business” problem. This paper describes a series of control systems for a standard production-inventory system (the basic unit of a supply chain) which have been used at Arizona State University as MATLAB®-based exercises in both undergraduate and graduate-level process control courses. Among the important control concepts illustrated by these exercises are: 1) modeling of supply chain dynamics using fluid analogies, 2) the benefits of multi-degree-of-freedom feedback-feedforward control over feedback-only control, and 3) the application of Internal Model Control and Model Predictive Control.