Coevolution of Products and Supply Chains Under Uncertainties: Risk Propagation Measures and Cost-Guaranteed Control Methods

The product and its supply chain (SC) are two key parts of corporate competitiveness under mass production or customization. Nevertheless, they are frequently isolated in manufacturing field evolution. At the operational decision level, this article studies uncertainty processing in the coevolution of products and SCs using a measure-to-control supported approach. A decision system framework that can incorporate macrochange interactions between products and SCs is presented. From the systematic view on coevolution, an interface for measure and control of uncertainty propagation is provided, which has two potential benefits: 1) facilitating concurrent measures of risks with multiple causes and consequences; and 2) allowing control theory to tackle multiple dynamics and identify their interrelations. Specifically, via effective value and entropy rate measures of bullwhip effect and ripple effect, cost-guaranteed control methods are proposed for attenuating risks of the product-SC uncertainty system. Finally, a mask SC application verifies the robustness and resilience of the proposed approach.