A green closed-loop supply chain for production and distribution of perishable products

Nowadays, the importance of supply chain management (SCM) includes timely and efficient decisions at strategic, tactical, and operational levels while addressing economic and environmental aspects. Meanwhile, designing an optimal supply chain to produce and distribute perishable items is of specific significance because of its prominent role in the human food pyramid. Delivery time of these products plays an important role which can directly affect customer satisfaction and is known as one of the main challenges. We try to develop a novel bi-objective model to configure a closed-loop supply chain network (SCN) for such products considering economic and environmental issues. Furthermore, according to the bi-objectiveness of our suggested model, the ε-constraint approach (EC) is employed to validate the model in small-scale instances. The obtained results showed that the model has an appropriate efficiency in solving the problems. Eventually, managerial insights are presented using the sensitivity analysis method for key parameters of the problem. It is demonstrated that the objective functions are so sensitive to the demand parameter where 20% increase and 10% decrease in this parameter lead to the most significant changes in the 1st and 2nd objective functions, respectively.