Provide a novel model for designing a sustainable supply chain network considering development and multi-level environmental decisions

One of the most important issues in the field of sustainable supply chain that affects the environment is the amount of contamination generated by the supply chain facilities. Failure to pay attention to this issue will have many economic, social and environmental consequences. Therefore, this research addresses this issue. In this study, a novel model for design of sustainable supply chain network is proposed where only environmentally friendly facilities can operate and others should be repaired or renovated. Furthermore, in order to increase the development and improve the living and social conditions of the people, in the proposed model, location of manufacturers is selected from among less developed regions with greater growth potential. To calculate the growth potential of the regions, criteria such as proximity to neighboring countries with higher GDP, unemployment rate, number of mines, etc. are considered and integrated with multi-criteria decision-making techniques. The methodology of this research is that first, the scores are calculated for each region by the decision-making methods, and then the problem including these scores is optimized. The modeling includes two stages of calculating the growth potential score of each region with multi-criteria decision-making techniques and then formulating a sustainable supply chain network problem. Finally, performance of the proposed model and reduction of environmental impacts to improve the sustainability of logistics systems are investigated and illustrated in a case study. In order to validate the model, several different sensitivity analyzes are presented. The results of computational analysis show efficiency and effectiveness of the model.