Control and Coordination of Supply Networks

A supply network is a set of facilities, connected by transportation links, whose function comprises the procurement of (raw) materials, transformation of these materials into intermediate and finished products and distribution of the finished products to consumers. Generalizing the original concept of a supply chain, where mainly linear or tree-structured arrangements of facilities and corresponding material flows are considered, the term supply network explicitly acknowledges the possibility of more complex structures, where in principle any of the involved components can supply each other.

In this project, we develop a general supply network model based on stochastic, discrete-time controlled dynamical systems. The goal is to derive an explicit state-feedback control, i.e., control laws as functions of the current state of the system. Differently from previous approaches, we do not assume a certain family of strategies a priori: in principle, we allow for any possible mapping of the system's state into the range of possible values for the control inputs. The specific form of this mapping will emerge as a result of solving a sequence of (multi-)parametric optimization problems in a dynamic programming scheme.

[Read more in this feature article from the IFOR Newsletter...]

Contact

• Dr. Marco Laumanns

Collaborators

• Dr. Marc Reimann
• Dr. Rico Zenklusen

External Collaborators

• Dr. Erjen Lefeber (Eindhoven University of Technology)
• Prof. Dr. Dieter Armbruster (Arizona State University)

Publications

• Laumanns M. (2007): "Determining Optimal Control Policies for Supply Networks Under Uncertainty." International Conference on Dynamics in Logistics (LDIC 2007), Bremen, Germany, August 28-30, 2007
• Laumanns M., Lefeber E. (2006): "Robust Optimal Control of Material Flows in Demand-driven Supply Networks." Physica A, 363(1):24-31. (DOI)

Student Projects

• A Stochastic Optimal Control Model for Supply Networks with Correlated Demand and Transshipment Options (Faris Cassim, Jacques Chastenet and Julien Uffer, Term Project, Autumn 2007)
• Implementation of a Solver for Parametric Linear Complementarity Problems for Model Predictive Control (Sebastiano Columbano, Diploma Thesis, Summer 2006)
• Supply Chain Management bei AMAG/Europcar (Corinne Brunner und Patrick Frei, Semesterarbeit, Sommer 2006)