DEVELOPING A THREE-OBJECTIVE MATHEMATICAL MODEL IN ORDER TO PLAN A SUSTAINABLE SUPPLY CHAIN FOR DETERIORATING AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS

With increasing population, food supply has become one of the major challenges facing governments and nations. On the one hand, the management of food waste and the excessive use of fertilizers and chemicals in the production of food products, on the other hand, have very detrimental effects on the environment and human health. Sustainability issues have spread to almost all branches of science, and studies in this area are on the rise. In this regard, supply chains have not been neglected and multi-objective models have been developed with regard to sustainability dimensions. Although most models in the field of sustainable supply chains consider only two economic and environmental dimensions, and social issues has been less considered by researchers. What is clear is that human beings are the most valuable capital on this planet, and the lack of focus on social matters, especially in the quantitative supply chain models, is due to the complexity of modeling this dimension. In this paper, along with economic and environmental dimensions, one of the most important social issues, the society healthy nutrition style of human, including customers, employees and other sectors of the society, has been considered. This way, a centralized two-echelon supply chain for agricultural products is considered. Deterioration and disposal of inventories in the warehouse and during transportation, the downward demand substitution, warehouse capacity limitation as well as non-linear holding cost are some specifications of the problem taken into account. A multi-objective linear mathematical model is proposed to model the problem and by applying a real case data, sensitivity analysis is done for main parameters. The numerical results show a significant interrelationship between the process of production and consumption in the direction of sustainability especially for the case of deteriorating agricultural products. In this way, the key role of supply chain managers not only in production planning, but also in providing a model for sustainable consumption of food and improving nutrition style will be declared.