Presenting a Management Model for a Multiobjective Sustainable Supply Chain in the Cellulosic Industry and Its Implementation by the NSGA-II Meta-Heuristic Algorithm

Abstract

In recent years, with changing conditions in global markets and competition between supply chains, organizations have realized that in order to grow and survive in today’s turbulent environment, they must make every effort to create and maintain a sustainable competitive advantage. Therefore, in this research, a multiobjective, multilevel, multiperiod, and multicommodity mathematical model is presented. The proposed model has five levels in the direct direction and three levels in the reverse direction. This research is one of the few studies that has considered the sustainable closed-loop supply chain of cellulosic-based products (paper and corrugated board) in the model and has considered it at all levels of the chain. Also, the quality of returned products in the reverse supply chain and its impact on the collection and recycling of products and returning to the supply chain are other contributions of this research. The results show, by increasing the transportation costs, the number of established distribution centers increases to a certain extent and finally remains constant. As it is shown, the reduction of transportation costs to the point of establishing four centers in the recession scenario and five centers in the boom scenario becomes saturated and is no longer able to minimize the number of established centers.