Control of production-distribution systems with unknown inputs and system failures

In this paper, we consider production-distribution systems with buffer and capacity constraints in the presence of unknown inputs. We face the problem of finding a control that drives the buffer levels to a prescribed value. We consider a continuous-time model and we show that some important propert ies hold which generally fail in the discrete-time case. In particular, we show that the case in which the controller knows the exte rnal input is equivalent to the case in which such information is not avail able. Furthermore, a decentralized strategy can be devised. We also show th at in the case of network failures, the controller does not need to know th e current network configuration in order to guarantee its tracking goal as long as a certain necessary and sufficient condition is satisfied.