Sliding mode control of periodic review perishable inventories with multiple suppliers and transportation losses

The purpose of this paper is to develop robust and computationally efficient supply chain management strategy ensuring fast reaction to the demand variations for periodic review perishable inventory systems. For that purpose, we apply a sliding mode approach and we propose a new discrete time warehouse management strategy. The strategy employs the sliding hyperplane appropriately designed to ensure a dead-beat performance of the closed loop system. Our strategy not only explicitly takes into account decay of goods stored in the warehouse (perishing inventories) but it also accounts for transportation losses which take place on the way from suppliers to the warehouse. The proposed strategy ensures full customers’ demand satisfaction, minimizes the on-hand inventory volume and prevents from exceeding the warehouse capacity. This reflects the need of simultaneous minimization of the lost sales costs and inventory holding costs. Furthermore, the strategy ensures that the ordered quantities of goods are always non-negative and upper bounded. These favourable properties of the proposed strategy are formally stated as a lemma and three theorems and proved in the paper.