Toward sustainability in designing an agricultural supply chain network: A case study on palm date

Nowadays, the agricultural and food supply chains have attracted both academia and industrial practitioners. This paper first considers the characteristics of the date product as one of the most well-known and rich fruits to design and address its supply chain design. Special characteristics in date products have made the design of the supply chain to be unique. Therefore, considering different customers along with the specific product flow is another contribution of this paper. Reportedly, there is no work on this topic. Several old and recent meta-heuristic algorithms are utilized in multi-objective meta-heuristics to reach better intensification and diversification trade-offs. By the Taguchi design experiment method, appropriate parameter values of the proposed algorithms are chosen. Besides, the solution quality is investigated by approaches including the relative percentage deviation (RPD) and the CPU time and the weighted LP-metric method. The results showed that a multi-objective Keshtel algorithm (MOKA) is more efficient and consistently outperforms other utilized algorithms.