Title: Designing and planning a sustainable supply chain network considering economic aspects, environmental impact, fixed job opportunities and customer service level

Authors: Alireza Taheri-Moghadam; Jafar Razmi; Mohammed Fazle Baki

Addresses: School of Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, North Kargar St., College of Engineering, Tehran, Iran ' School of Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, North Kargar St., College of Engineering, Tehran, Iran ' Faculty of Business, University of Windsor, Room 410 Odette Building, Windsor Ontario, Canada

Abstract: In this paper, a sustainable supply chain (SSND) problem is developed which contains economic aspects, environmental issues, social impacts and customer service level. The economic objective is minimising total cost of the whole network (production, transportation, inventory holding/stock-out and investment). CO2 emission is considered as environmental issue and the social objective is fixed job opportunities. The customer satisfaction objective contains lead time and stock-out ratio. All of the objectives are in contrast and there is a need for using multi-objective approaches for solving the problem. Normalised normal constraint method is used to capture trade-off between objectives. Simulated numerical examples are considered to evaluate the model and solution approach. Impact of some parameters on customer service level is analysed by sensitivity analysis. The results show that the proposed model performance is acceptable and it can prepare good managerial decisions for real cases by considering four aspects of business environments simultaneously.

Keywords: sustainable supply chain network design; SSND; multi-objective optimisation; normalised normal constraint; NNC; social impacts; fixed job opportunities; customer service level.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPMB.2019.097821

International Journal of Process Management and Benchmarking, 2019 Vol.9 No.1, pp.73 - 100

Received: 04 Oct 2016
Accepted: 12 Nov 2016

Published online: 13 Feb 2019 *

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