Abstract
An inventory control system was developed for multiproduct batch plants with an arbitrary number of batch processes and storage units. Customer orders are received by the plant at intervals and in quantities that are subject to random fluctuations. The objective of the plant operation is to minimize the total cost while maintaining inventory levels within the storage or warehouse capacity by adjusting the startup times, the quantities of raw material orders, and production batch sizes. An adaptive model-based control algorithm was developed that uses a periodic square wave model to represent the flows of material between the processes and the storage units. The effectiveness of this approach was demonstrated by performing simulations.