A multi-objective sustainable supply chain network design problem for perishable foods

Increasing demand for food, environmental degradation, postharvest losses, and lack of financial resources, especially in developing countries, encourage manufacturing supply chains to develop integrated decision models for jointly incorporating economic, environmental, and social aspects into the supply chain network design problems. This research aims to develop a novel multi-objective decision support model for designing a sustainable multi-product green supply chain network for perishable food products. The model aims to minimize the total costs and carbon dioxide emissions while maximizing the social impacts simultaneously. Numerical experiments on several test problems indicate that the total cost is mostly impacted by the fixed cost of constructing warehouses and maintenance costs, respectively. The total amount of carbon emissions is more influenced by the amount of carbon produced in warehouses than transportation activities. We also found that the number of jobs created plays a much more critical role on social satisfaction than the amount of traffic generated by the supply chain. Also, the number of jobs created and the amount of carbon gas produced in the warehouses have a direct relationship; therefore, these two factors should be considered together simultaneously in the supply chain network design problem.