Robust H∞ control for chaotic supply chain networks

A supply chain network (SCN) is a complex nonlinear system involving multiple entities. The policy of each entity in decision-making and the uncertainties of demand and supply (or production) significantly affect the complexity of its behavior. Although several studies have presented information about the measurement of chaos in the supply chain, there has not been an appropriate way to control the chaos in it. In this paper, the chaos control problem is considered for a SCN with a time-varying delay between its entities. The innovation of this paper is the more comprehensive modeling, analysis, and control of chaotic behavior in the system. The proposed model has a control center to determine the orders of entities and control their inventories. Customer demand is modeled as an unknown exogenous disturbance. A robust H∞ control method is designed to control its chaotic behavior in terms of a certain linear matrix inequality technique that can be readily solved using the MATLAB LMI toolbox. By using this technique and calculating the maximum Lyapunov exponent, decision parameters are determined in such a way that the behavior of the SCN is stable.