Sustainability Awareness in Supply Chain Planning Under Uncertainty

Abstract

Nowadays great emphasize is being placed on the fragility and vulnerability of organizations regarding the uncertainty and unpredictable conditions. The environmental and social awareness are changing the concept of growth that guided companies for decades. Profound restructuring of supply chain, SC, is emerging regarding the sustainability impacts that is being placed in the top priorities of companies’ agenda. Besides, the international dimension of SC, as well as the complex partnership networks present great challenges to the paradigm of fully integrated SC. Following these motivations, a novel proposal was developed to help the decision-making process within an uncertain environment. The goal of the approach is to develop a planning framework to help SC managers to balance between environmental footprint, social responsibility, service level to customer and economic criteria. A mathematical formulation is proposed and the model applicability is shown through the solution of an industrial example. The practical implementation involves the development of a decision model framework (MILP formulation) to optimally manage performance indicators and to assure sustainability requirements. The impact of sustainable policies in the SC planning strategy is evaluated for different managing scenarios. These bring new insights concerning SC planning under uncertainty.