Abstract
Manufacturing firms are faced to respond flexibly and effectively to a wide range of customer needs. It is a promising direction to simultaneously design product family and supply chain network (SCN) toward such demand. This design problem must be assessed as strategic-level decision making under uncertainties without any detailed and fixed information on design conditions. This paper proposes a mathematical framework for simultaneous design problem with considering their optimal profitability and robustness against facility disruption of SCN. In this paper, we discuss its problem structure of design problem and formulate it as a mixed integer programming. A computational method to solve the optimization problem in which only the profitability is considered as the objective is configured. An assessment procedure for the robustness of the profitability-oriented optimal solution by evaluating the Pareto optimality among the nominal optimal solution and its competitive solutions is proposed. The application of the proposed method with a case study of designing a product family of drip coffee maker is demonstrated in order to verify its effectiveness.
