An integrated model for sustainable supplier selection and multi-period multi-product lot-sizing for packaging film industry in Iran

Abstract

The emergence of sustainability issues has created increasing interest among those involved in the field of sustainable supply chain management. Companies are motivated to modify their supply chains activities based on sustainability issues to enhance their overall level of sustainability in order to fulfil demanding environmental and social legislation and to deal with increasing market forces from different stakeholder groups. Within supply chain activities, selecting appropriate suppliers based on the criteria of sustainability, e.g., economic, environmental, and societal might help companies move towards sustainable development. Although several studies have been accomplished to incorporate sustainability criteria into supplier selection problem, little attention has been paid to developing a comprehensive mathematical model that allocates the exact quantities of orders to suppliers considering lot-sizing problems. Moreover, the effect of inflation as an important issue for companies in the developing countries has been neglected in studies that examined multi-period multi-product lot-sizing along with supplier selection. In this study, a multi-objective mathematical model for sustainable supplier selection integrated with multi-period multi-product lot-sizing problem under the effects of inflation was developed. The model consists of four objective functions which are minimizing total cost, maximizing total social, total environmental score, and total economic qualitative scores. The mathematical model was developed based on the parameters discovered by preprocessing the social, environmental, and economic data of suppliers using a rule-based-weighted fuzzy approach and fuzzy analytical hierarchy process. The model attempted to simultaneously balance different costs under inflationary conditions to optimize the total cost of purchasing and other objective functions. A comprehensive framework was developed as a road map for procurement organizations in order to facilitate the allocation of optimal order quantities to suppliers in a sustainable supply chain. The proficiency and applicability of a proposed approach was illustrated using a case study of packaging films from the food industry. For each main criterion of sustainability, their related subcriteria and influencing factors were extracted from literature and the most related ones were selected by company’s experts. In this research, green competencies, environmental management system, pollution, occupational safety and health, training and education, contractual stakeholder, economic qualitative, and cost were selected by company’s experts as the main subcriteria of sustainable supplier selection. The consideration of sustainability criteria in the proposed multi-objective model revealed that a higher value of sustainable purchasing can be achieved in comparison with a single objective costbased model. In addition, the results show that the proposed model can provide a purchasing plan for the company while monitoring the effect of inflation and assuaging its concerns regarding sustainability issues.