Track: Operations Research

Abstract

Due to increasing concern of environmental degradation by various supply chain activities such as sourcing, transportation, inventory holding, manufacturing, and distribution, industries have begun redesigning their supply chain network to integrate recycling and reuse of product returns.  The combination of the forward movement of goods from raw materials to the end user and the reverse movement of goods from the end user to the manufacturer, or even back into raw materials through recycling is entitled as Closed Loop Supply Chains (CLSC). In this paper a multi objective Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model is developed to determine the optimal locations of the facilities and the distribution of flows between the facilities in the CLSC. The sustainability goals addressed in this research include minimizing cost (economic goal), minimizing carbon emission (environment goal) and maximizing the employment (social goal).  The proposed MILP has been validated using a randomly generated data set.