Control of production-distribution systems under discrete disturbances and control actions.

This paper deals with the robust control and optimization of production-distribution systems. The model used in our problem formulation is a general network flow model that describes production, logistics, and transportation applications. The novelty in our formulation is in the discrete nature of the control and disturbance inputs. We highlight three main contributions: First, we derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of robustly control invariant hyperboxes. Second, we show that a stricter version of the same condition is sufficient for global convergence to an invariant set. Third, for the scalar case, we show that these results parallel existing results in the setting where the control actions and disturbances are analog. We conclude with two simple illustrative examples.