Design of a supply chain network considering environmental factors under uncertainty and solving the model by multi- objective differential evolutionary algorithm (MODE)

Today, design of a supply chain network which balances economic and environmental issues is attractive not only for researchers and practitioners, but also for managers and industrial decision makers.
This study introduces a bi-objective supply chain network which uses a fuzzy approach in order to include uncertainty in parameters of the model and apply it to a real case. Moreover, this model takes environmental and economic issues into account simultaneously. This consideration occurs in production and recovery technologies. Furthermore, the aim of the represented model is to choose the optimal production technology at all centers, the optimal production planning, facilities and location and the optimal number of those technologies which must be purchased. The fuzzy model is converted to an auxiliary crisp model by Jimenez approach and then solved with є-constraint. For the large sized problems, the Multi Objective Differential Evolutionary algorithm (MODE) is applied.
Findings: It was shown that the cost objective functions and CO2 emission objective function are in conflict with each other, implying that any increase in one of them leads to decrease of another one and vice versa. Totally, it can be concluded that the -constraint method and the MODE method are appropriate and qualified methods for solving the auxiliary crisp model of supply chain network design problems.