ORIGINAL ARTICLE Cost efficient robust global supply chain system design under uncertainty Abdulaziz T. Almaktoom 1 & Krishna K. Krishnan 2 & Pingfeng Wang 2 & Samir Alsobhi 2 Received: 17 December 2014 /Accepted: 12 October 2015 # Springer-Verlag London 2015 Abstract Brutal competitions in today’s global supply chain have forced business enterprises to focus attention on their supply chains. These issues have guided this research to intro- duce a supply chain service level measure and develop a novel robust design optimization (RDO) approach to assure service level rate requirements and minimize total service level costs. A supply chain system design must maintain its efficiency over time while coping with the uncertainty in production and trans- portation. Unexpected delay in the product flow can render the supply chain system inefficient with respect to service level costs. Analytical models for the determination of the risk in- volved in a supply chain system design are difficult to derive when uncertainty is involved in the supply chain. In this paper, the service level rate measure approach is detailed first. Then, the methodology for the robust design optimization-based ap- proach is provided. Two case studies are performed to demon- strate the effectiveness of the proposed service level measure and developed robust design optimization model. Results from the two case studies have shown that by implementing the developed robust design optimization approach, a system is able to achieve a 90 % service level rate while minimizing performance cost and uncertainty impact. Keywords Supply chain system . Service level rate . Robust design optimization 1 Introduction A major tenet in the global supply chain (SC) system is to ensure continuous quality, reliability, resilience, and manage- ment improvement through strategic planning, operational tools, mathematical modeling, and optimization. SC systems risk management has increased the global concern in recent years [1, 2]. Beamon [3] illustrates that there is more research needed in the SC system. Specifically, there is a need for improvement of SC systems performance measures, models, and procedures to link SC systems output to the performance measures, development of solutions and approaches to over- come issues affecting SC systems modeling, and develop- ment of new techniques to aid in the design and analysis of SC systems. This research provides a study on global SC risk, uncer- tainty, and service level cost. It uses robust design optimiza- tion (RDO) to promote the objective of reducing service level (SL) cost. This is challenging due to the complexity in prod- ucts, diversity of suppliers, and the geographic distribution of customers, in addition to the intertwined process among sup- pliers, manufacturing, distributors, retailers, and customers’ needs. From a SC management perspective, this is a set of synchronized decisions and actions applied to efficiently in- tegrate suppliers, manufacturers, transporters, retailers, and customers so that the right product is distributed to the right locations at the right time, with the right quantities, quality, and price. This research looks at global SC risks and uncer- tainties along with SL cost in order to minimize the system- wide cost while maintaining customer satisfaction through SL requirements. This research describes the details of a RDO methodology to design a cost-efficient robust SC system. A robust SC de- sign can be obtained by using RDO and considering all enti- ties and activities in the SC system. The findings of this study * Krishna K. Krishnan krishna.krishnan@wichita.edu 1 Department of Operations and Information Management, Effat University, PO Box 34689, Jeddah 21478, Saudi Arabia 2 Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS 67260, USA Int J Adv Manuf Technol DOI 10.1007/s00170-015-7965-6