Int. J. Logistics Economics and Globalisation, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2018 277 Copyright © 2018 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Optimising supply chain management using robust control synthesis Xiao Xu, Tran Xuan Thuong and Hwan-Seong Kim* Logistics, Korea Maritime and Ocean University, 727 Taejong-ro, Yeongdo-gu, Busan, Korea Fax: +82 51 405 8822 Email: xiaoxu@kmou.ac.kr Email: xuanthuongtran@gmail.com Email: kimhs@kmou.ac.kr *Corresponding author Sam-Sang You Mechanical Engineering, Korea Maritime and Ocean University, 727 Taejong-ro, Yeongdo-gu, Busan, Korea Email: ssyou@kmou.ac.kr Abstract: The inventory management of supply chain is concerned with an efficient transportation of materials and products through supply chain members. In this paper, a series of linear models have been presented with lag time uncertainty for improving inventory management. In addition, a fluid analogy has been used for a single-product manufacturing system, or the basic unit of a supply chain. Robust control synthesis, which has been proven to cope with its ability for the system with high uncertainty, is utilised in optimising the inventory management and guaranteeing high performance of complete system. In addition, this control scheme aims to ensure the customer satisfaction by tracking and keeping the actual inventory close to target inventory under the influence of uncertainty. The extensive numerical simulations have been carried out to validate the proposed approach against disturbances. Finally, the simulation results show that the robust control system ensures good ability on keeping the target inventory under uncertainty. Keywords: inventory management; supply chain; disturbance and uncertainty; fluid analogy; robust control synthesis; customer satisfaction. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Xu, X., Thuong, T.X., Kim, H-S. and You, S-S. (2018) ‘Optimising supply chain management using robust control synthesis’, Int. J. Logistics Economics and Globalisation, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp.277–291. Biographical notes: Xiao Xu is studying a doctor course in the Department of Logistics of the Korea Maritime and Ocean University, South Korea. His practical experience includes the smart vehicle design in autonomous logistics project. His research focuses on inventory optimisation of supply chain management based on robust control theory.