Vmi Mode Adaptive Supply Chain Inventory Control Research

Inventory as a bridge exists in all stages of supply chain. With the increasingly fierce of market competition, the status of inventory management in a supply chain is more and more important. Facing shorter life cycle of product, faster replacement of product, the environment of inventory management is becoming increasingly complex, especially the ever-changing demands of market. The traditional inventory control models usually approach to the constant demand or the distribution of demand is known. So the first we should do is to find a new inventory model to adapt to the ever-changing demands of market.The adaptive inventory control is a new way which combines the adaptive control method with inventory management. With incomplete information, it uses self-tuning adaptive control method to adjust and improve inventory control strategy based on the real-time feedback data. This method can make the forecast of demand closer to actual demand, improve the level of customer service and reduce the inventory cost.Firstly, this article reviews the basic knowledge of the supply chain inventory management and VMI. Secondly, introduces several common methods of inventory control. Then, summers the concept and the development of the adaptive inventory control and gives a model based on VMI. In simulation, a VMI inventory control model for a two-stage supply chain consisted of one supplier and one retailer was proposed. For non-stationary demand, an adaptive inventory control method was proposed. In this approach, the secondary exponential smoothing method was used to forecast the demand, and the reinforcement learning was adopted to evaluates the effect of the adopted safety factor, and then to adjust the level of customer service. Simulation results show that the proposed adaptive inventory control scheme can get a very satisfied service level for different non-stationary demand modes.