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1. Introduction
In a competitive economy, the problem of efficient management of supply chains has become increasingly important. Therefore, recently many attempts to solve the problem have been proposed. These attempts differ in various aspects including supply chain modeling, specific performance measures, primary objectives, and methods applied to accomplish the objectives [1]. A good overview of the results obtained in this area can be found in [2–7] and numerous references cited in those papers. The earliest application of the control theory techniques to the management of logistic processes was reported about sixty years ago when Simon (H. A. Simon for his contribution to the field received the Nobel prize in economics in 1978) in paper [8] applied servomechanism control algorithm to get a feasible strategy of goods replenishment for continuous-time, single product inventory. Soon after that a discrete time servomechanism control algorithm for managing of goods replenishment process has also been proposed [9]. Then, block diagram representation of conventional inventories and production management systems was introduced by Towill [10]. One of the most significant developments in this area was the result of Forrester [11, 12], who analyzed the amplification of demand fluctuations when moving upstream in the supply chain. The phenomenon has later been termed bullwhip effect. Important contribution to the study of this effect has been presented in [13–19]. The authors of those papers were able to smooth ordering policies and stock levels and have demonstrated that application of control theory methods helps effectively prevent the occurrence of undesirable bullwhip effect. Over the last twenty years, numerous valuable solutions in this field have been presented. Therefore, in this section we are only able to mention a few of them. In [16, 20], an autoregressive moving average (ARMA) system structure has been applied in order to model uncertain demand. Furthermore, model predictive control of supply chains has been widely...