Evaluating and Analyzing Sustainable Development Policies in the Oil Products Transportation Network with a System Dynamics Approach

Today, one of the most important concerns of the oil industry is sustainable development. Achieving sustainability requires recognizing the factors that affect sustainability, their dynamic relationships, and the right decisions of senior executives. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and analyze the sustainable development policies of the Iranian oil products transportation network based on the dynamic behavior of sustainability variables.

In this study, the factors affecting economic, social and environmental sustainability were identified based on the research background and the opinion of industry experts and the dynamic model of sustainability of this network was designed with the system dynamics approach. Optimal policies with different sustainability strategies were then evaluated and analyzed based on the behavior of the main variables of sustainability.

Based on the background of research and opinion of industry experts, 22 factors were selected as factors affecting economic, social and environmental sustainability and five strategies including reducing transportation costs, increasing community satisfaction, reducing environmental pollution, reducing accidents and combining all the cases were considered to achieve sustainability in the National Iranian Oil Products Distribution Company. By applying policies appropriate to each strategy and comparing their results, it was found that the behavior of the main variables of sustainability shows a better trend by adopting the Fifth Strategy (Comprehensive Development).

This research showed that sustainable development can be achieved by recognizing the factors affecting sustainability and causal relationship between them and evaluating and analyzing comprehensive sustainability policies based on the behavior of the main variables of sustainability.