An integrated framework based on triple bottom line accounting and stakeholders’ perspective to promote sustainable facility location and route allocation network decisions

Abstract

Sustainable operations are becoming important for companies, after the United Nations 2030 agenda that emerges countries to move toward sustainable development. Taking care of the environment, society, local communities, and related stakeholders are components of sustainable development that are affected by companies’ operations. The facility location/demand allocation/route assignment decisions (hereinafter network) for a company is an operation that has varying economic, environmental, and social outcomes (three pillars) for the company and the related stakeholders. Having an integrated decision support framework that considers three pillars simultaneously and incorporates stakeholders’ preferences seems necessary in the network design to reach a sustainable network and promote sustainable development. This framework is missing in the literature. We present a framework that integrates multi-objective mathematical modeling (MOMM) (Anvari & Turkay, 2017) and multi-actor multi-criteria analysis (MAMCA) (Macharis et al., 2012). MOMM generates a pool of feasible sustainable solutions based on three pillars. Then MAMCA analyzes the feasible solutions for each stakeholder. The company (investor) uses these analyses to decide on the best sustainable solution, which satisfies the three pillars and reduces future risks of conflicts among stakeholders. We apply our approach to an original case to establish the network for a juice company in Turkey using real data.