Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science (대한안전경영과학회지)

Korea Safety Management & Science (대한안전경영과학회)
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Reinforcement leaning based multi-echelon supply chain distribution planning

강화학습 기반의 다단계 공급망 분배계획

  • Kwon, Ick-Hyun (Department of Industrial and Management Engineering, Inje University)
  • 권익현 (인제대학교 산업경영공학과)
  • Received : 2014.07.20
  • Accepted : 2014.12.22
  • Published : 2014.12.31
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Abstract

Various inventory control theories have tried to modelling and analyzing supply chains by using quantitative methods and characterization of optimal control policies. However, despite of various efforts in this research filed, the existing models cannot afford to be applied to the realistic problems. The most unrealistic assumption for these models is customer demand. Most of previous researches assume that the customer demand is stationary with a known distribution, whereas, in reality, the customer demand is not known a priori and changes over time. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning based adaptive echelon base-stock inventory control policy for a multi-stage, serial supply chain with non-stationary customer demand under the service level constraint. Using various simulation experiments, we prove that the proposed inventory control policy can meet the target service level quite well under various experimental environments.

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References

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