Investigation of Sustainability in Supply Chain Design

Almost all of the industrial companies with respect to climate change, the exhaustion of the fossil fuel and a shortage of natural resources are faced with the challenge of sustainability. Indeed, sustainability management seeks to balance economic, environmental and social performance. Sustainable supply chain deals with economic, environmental and social aspects and gains some values. Due to the importance of sustainability, in this paper, we first introduce different definitions of sustainability and sustainable supply chain management. After that we review the important papers in the fields of sustainability supply chain designing and sustainable supply chain management during the 2005-2014 years. These papers are classified in terms of the objective function, the problem, uncertainty and approach. The result is shown by graphical tools. Finally strengths and weaknesses of the previous works are investigated. The paper ends with suggestions for future research. Most of the review papers about this subject focus their review on concepts of sustainability supply chain management. Some classification categories in this paper such as: uncertainty, type of objective function and the problem are novel.