Optimal Control Strategy for Serial Supply Chain

With the emerging of global economy and the development of the technology in computer and communications, the enterprises are facing to new opportunities but also more challenges, which led to the concept of SC (Supply Chain). By controlling and collaborating each part of the supply chain, SCM (Supply Chain Management) reaches the aim of reducing the cost, improving the quality as well as service level, and so on, further enhances the integrated competition ability of the whole supply chain. SCM includes many aspects of the management activity, and the inventory management is one of the key aspects among them. In this chapter, the research focuses on inventory control strategy optimization related to activities, such as the purchase, production, storage and transportation of material, work in process and finished goods inventory within up-stream and down-stream enterprises along the serial supply chain. The main research aspects are as follows: 1. To review the state of art of inventory control strategies of supply chain. 2. Supply chain inventory control strategy optimization is based on the simulation of supply chain inventory system. So, in this chapter, the general model of serial supply chain inventory control strategy is addressed. 3. Model for single objective control strategy optimization is established, which describes the optimization problem of serial supply chain inventory control strategy with the objective of minimum cost and the constraint of the customer service level and average input standard deviation. 4. The algorithm of GA (Genetic Algorithm), Random-PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) and PEA (Pheromone Evolutionary Algorithm) are designed for the model. Simulation studies suggested that each of the algorithms can solve this problem efficient, and Random –PSO algorithm is most efficient one. O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w .in te ch w eb .o rg