Achieving Robustness Objectives Within a Supply Chain by Means of Reliability Allocation

Supply chain is regarded as a complex system that consists of suppliers, manufacturers, vendors and logistics service providers. Robustness is the main target in supply chain management. In recent years, robust optimization has emerged as a methodology for managing supply chain risks. In this paper, the authors develop a method of achieving its robustness objective within a supply chain using reliability allocation. Supply chain reliability allocation tries to apply the fundamentals of engineering reliability allocation to a supply chain system, and distribute a supply chain reliability index among all its members. Furthermore, they discuss how deal with the supply chain members that had failed to meet their reliability targets.