Including Sustainability Criteria into Inventory Models

Research on sustainability performance has considerably enriched operations management literature in recent years. However, work with quantitative models is still scarce. This paper thus contributes to revisit classical inventory models by taking sustainability concerns into account. We believe that reducing all aspects of sustainable development to a single objective is not desirable. We thus reformulate the classical economic order quantity model as a multiobjective problem. We propose to refer to this model as the sustainable order quantity model. Then, a multi-echelon extension of the sustainable order quantity model is studied. For both models, the set of efficient solutions (Pareto optimal solutions) is analytically characterized. These results are used to provide some insights about the effectiveness of different regulatory policies to control carbon emissions. We also propose an interactive procedure that allows the decision maker to quickly identify his / her best option among these solutions. The proposed interactive procedure is a new combination of multi-criteria decision analysis technique