Metamodelling of Inventory-Control Simulations Based on a Multilayer Perceptron

Abstract

Inventory control problems arise in various industries, and each single real-world inventory is replete with non-standard factors and subtleties. Practical stochastic inventory control problems are often analytically intractable, because of their complexity. In this regard, simulation-optimization is becoming more and more popular tool for solving complicated business-driven problems. Unfortunately, simulation, especially detailed, is both time and memory consuming. In the light of this fact, it may be more reasonable to use an alternative cheaper-to-compute metamodel, which is specifically designed in order to approximate an original simulation. In this research we discus metamodelling of stochastic multiproduct inventory control system with perishable products using a multilayer perceptron with a rectified linear unit as an activation function.