Multiple-sourcing in Sustainable Closed-loop Supply Chain Network Design: Tire Industry Case Study

The interaction of sustainability and resilience has not been sufficiently addressed in the supply chain literature. Applying sustainability and resilience concepts in a supply chain means the simultaneous optimization of the cost and recourses, including human and environmental ones, in facing possible risks. This paper tries to fill this gap by considering them simultaneously in a closed-loop supply chain. For this, a new mixed-integer programming (MIP) model was formulated for a closed-loop supply chain. In this research, different dimensions of sustainable development have been taken into account through reducing the total cost, energy consumption, and pollution and increasing job opportunities, and multiple-sourcing strategy has been applied for the resiliency of the supply chain. To validate the proposed model, the real data of a tire industry was used and the model was solved using the e-Constraint method. The results emphasized the necessity of combining sustainability and resilience in a closed-loop supply chain, where the high amounts of demand, in addition to increasing the cost, energy consumption, and pollution, increase job opportunities and the need to backup suppliers for raw materials.