Title: Goal-based approach for environmentally sustainable stochastic procurement problem

Authors: Harpreet Kaur; Surya Prakash Singh

Addresses: Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India ' Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India

Abstract: Due to volatile business environment, manufacturing firms regularly face huge challenges in adapting to market uncertainties, increased competition and environmental legislations imposed by governments. Therefore, there is a need to capture the uncertainties in various parameters while keeping firm's own interest of maximising profitability by minimising overall costs. This paper considers a multi period procurement problem of a firm operating in a carbon sensitive and uncertain business environment procuring multiple items from multiple vendors using multiple carriers. The firm is having limited carbon quota exceeding which carbon credits must be bought. The paper proposes a goal-based approach for environmentally sustainable procurement problem (Goal_ESSP). The Goal_ESSP model addresses the firm's interests by putting various targets as goals and establishing an optimal trade-off among various goal targets. The proposed Goal_ESSP model considers stochastic parameter to capture uncertainties. Finally, the Goal_ESSP model is demonstrated using three illustrations which are solved in LINGO 10.

Keywords: goal programming; stochastic; procurement; environmentally sustainable; carbon emissions; lot-sizing; vendor selection; carrier selection.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSOM.2018.091907

International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 2018 Vol.30 No.2, pp.226 - 253

Received: 20 Jun 2016
Accepted: 30 Sep 2016
Published online: 21 May 2018 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article