Green supply chain network design with emphasis on inventory decisions

Abstract

Excessive greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector have led companies to move towards a sustainable supply chain network design. In this study we present a new bi-objective non-linear formulation where multiple inventory components are integrated into the location and routing decisions throughout the supply chain network. To efficiently solve the proposed model, we implement an exact method and four evolutionary algorithms for small and large-scale instances. Extensive computational results and sensitivity analysis are performed to validate the efficiency of the proposed approaches, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Besides, we run a statistical analysis to investigate whether there is any statistically significant difference between solution methods.

Keywords

• Location-routing-inventory
• Supply chain network
• Evolutionary algorithms
• Bi-objective optimization
• Pareto solution