H∞ tracking control for periodic-review inventory systems

This paper is concerned with the H_∞ tracking control design problem of a period-review inventory management system with perishable goods. The inventory system under consideration is replenished from multiple supply sources. By introducing a linear exogenous system, which describes the characteristics of the desired stock level of the inventory system, an H_∞ tracking control scheme is presented and some sufficient conditions of the existence of the H_∞ tracking controller are developed via the linear matrix inequality methods. Simulation results show that the proposed H_∞ tracking control scheme is capable of improving the performance of the inventory management system significantly. Under the designed controller, the desired stock level of the system can be tracked effectively by the stock level of the inventory management system.