Sustainability Optimization for Global Supply Chain Decision-making

Modern enterprises of all sizes operate in global manufacturing networks and complex global supply chains. Because sustainability is now a major concern, global manufacturing enterprises must optimize their global supply chain over multiple objectives including sustainability. It is important for such enterprises to analyze their global supply chain across all the three pillars of sustainability (society, economy and environment) when making a distribution network decision. A cradle-to-gate approach is taken, which means this decision can depend on the manufacturing site, all its suppliers, raw material source and transportation right until the customer gate. In this article, a multi-objective optimization model is presented that provides a rigorous method to optimize over all the three pillars of sustainability using a cradle-to-gate approach.