Fuzzy Approach to Decision Support System Design for Inventory Control and Management

The ubiquitous nature of inventory and its reliance on a reliable decision support system (DSS) is crucial for ensuring continuous availability of goods. The DSS needs to be designed in a manner that enables it to highlight its present status. Further, the DSS should be able to provide indications about subtle and large-scale variations that are likely to occur in the supply chain within the context of the decision-making framework and inventory management. However, while dealing with the parameters of the system, it is observed that its operations and mechanisms are surrounded by uncertain, imprecise, and vague environments. Fuzzy-based approaches are best suited for such situations; however, these require assistance from learning systems like artificial neural network (ANN) to facilitate automated decision support. When ANN and fuzzy are combined, the fuzzy neural system and the neuro-fuzzy system (NFS) are formulated. The model of the DSS reported here is based on a framework commonly known as adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), which is a version of NFS. The configured model has the advantages of both the ANN and fuzzy systems, and has been tested for the design of a DSS for use as part of inventory control. In this work, we report the design of an ANFIS-based DSS configured to work as DSS for inventory management. The system accepts demand as input and generates procurement, ordering, and holding cost to control production and supply. The system deals with a certain profitability rating required to quantify the changes in the input and is combined with the day-to-day inventory records and demand-available cycle. The effectiveness of the system has been checked in terms of number and types of membership used, accuracy generated, and computational efficiency accounted by the computation cycles required.