Supply chain network optimization with environmental impacts

Traditionally the design of supply chains has been based on economic objectives. As societal environment concerns grow, environmental aspects are also emerging, at the industry level, as decisive factors within the context of supply chain management. The investment towards logistics structures that consider both economic and environmental performance is nowadays an important research topic. However, much is still to be done. This paper, addresses the planning and design of supply chain structures for annual profit maximization, while considering environmental aspects. The latter are accounted through the Eco-indicator methodology, which is used to quantify the damage to human health. Profit and environmental impacts are balanced through the use of an optimization approach adapted from symmetric fuzzy linear programming (SFLP), while the supply chain is modelled as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) optimization problem using the Resource-Task- Network (RTN) methodology. The obtained model is validated through the solution of an example, where its applicability to supply chain problems is demonstrated