The Impact of Supply Chain Network Optimization on Total Cost and Environment

Abstract

As the global warming increases, green supply chain is a practice of great importance to be considered by production and distributing firms. In this paper, an optimization model is developed for a supply chain network with the main objectives to minimize the total cost of the network and pollutants' emission to the environment. Product distribution of a local paper mill with production facilities as supply sources and retailers as demand points is solved optimally. The incorporation of traffic factor on a supply route further broadened the problem. Different pollutants emitting from transportation vehicles and their impacts are presented briefly. A case study is solved to analyze how the model performs with the changing network characteristics. Computational results show that the proposed model performs efficiently for all test problems. Keywords-Green supply chain, network design, optimal solution.