A typical production-distribution system consist of three main echelons representing the retailer, distributors, and a factory each with an on-site warehouse. The system is sufficiently general and realistic to represent many industrial situations. However, decision functions and parameters have been selected to apply particularly to the production and distribution of consumer durables. The flows included in the model are materials, orders, and those information flows needed to support the material and order-rate decisions.In this work, a realistic production-distribution system has been used as a basic model, which consists of three sectors: retailer, distributor, and factory. That system is a nonlinear 25th-order continuous system interconnected between the echelons. Using a modern control algorithm, a typical multi-echelon production-distribution system using a dynamic controller is numerically simulated in the nominal plant and in the perturbed plant when the piecewise constant manufacturing decision is limited by a factory manufacturing upper-limit due to capital equipment, manpower, and factory lotsize.
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