| Sustainable supply chain management covers interactions between the economic dimension, the environment, and society. My dissertation, titled multi-criteria methods for designing and evaluating sustainable supply chains, studies supply chain decisions-making and trade-offs at the interface between supply chain operations and the environment. My dissertation comprises four research papers that develop novel approaches that enhance the literature of supply chain management.;The first article, titled "A two-phase multi-criteria decision support system for supply chain management", focused on the economic dimension, considered for a long time as the only performance that guarantee supply chain design and planning efficiencies. The proposed approach introduces a two-phase hierarchical approach to solve a multi-criteria SCM problem integrating both strategic and tactical decisions. The first phase evaluates different potential configurations of supply chains using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The second phase solves the network for the optimal safety stock placement using dynamic programming.;Although the environmental and social criteria are not considered, they can be added at the first phase as additional criteria to ensure the selection of sustainable supply chain. However, it is better to include these criteria at the design phase to consider the most important strategic decisions that influence the economic, environmental and social performance of the supply chain.;Thus, the second article, titled "Designing and evaluating sustainable supply chains", introduces a multi-objective linear programming model for sustainable supply chain design that takes into account the economic and the environmental objectives at the design time. This article addresses the design of supply chains that are also sensitive to the carbon market. The proposed methodology provides decision makers with the ability to evaluate the trade-offs between total logistics costs and carbon offsetting under different supply chain operating strategies, environmental regulatory constraints and carbon market price evolution. Validation using an illustrative example derived from the steel industry, where legislation imposes caps on greenhouse gases emissions, shows the advantages of such novel approach. This paper shows also that under the dynamic of the carbon market place, it is important to consider a multi-period model for the strategic planning of sustainable supply chains.;The third article, titled "Design of sustainable supply chain under the emission trading scheme", focus on the long-term, strategic planning of sustainable and closed-loop supply chains. The design task is formulated as a multi-objective optimization linear program that accounts for the minimization of total logistics costs (economic performance) and greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions (environmental impact). From an economic perspective, the link with "Environmental Economics Solutions" is made through the Emission Trading Scheme. On the other hand, the environmental performance evaluation is based on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology that quantifies the burdens and impact along the life cycle stages. Thus, the material and energy balances are considered in the supply chain network design problem as well as many critical outputs. Capabilities of the proposed model are illustrated through a numerical study.;Keywords : Supply chain design, sustainable supply chain, environment, recycling, carbon market, mixed integer programming, multi-criteria decision making, multi-objective optimization. |
