Analyzing the impact of sustainability on the network design and planning decisions in a spare part supply chain: an empirical investigation.

Economical, environmental, and social issues are significant challenges for industries and governments nowadays. The spare parts impose high inventory costs on the companies and require human resources, energy, and budget for the repair operations. These issues justify integrating repair, and inventory management decisions to reduce costs. Since the system is interacting with the environment, incorporating the sustainability dimensions with network design and planning decisions help managers to make more reliable decisions. We investigated the social and environmental dimensions to cover the sustainability dimensions of the spare part supply chain. These attributes contribute to industry-oriented properties in real-world problems. This paper investigates a multi-objective model to minimize costs while maximizing sustainability in a repairable spare part supply chain. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is utilized to assess social and environmental dimensions. Finally, the model is solved using NSGA-II with a priority-based encoding and decoding procedure. The findings shed light on contributing to formulating the spare part supply chain sustainability which integrates the network design and planning decisions resulting in more reliable outcomes.