Promoting sustainability of automotive products through strategic assortment planning

Assortment planning seeks to find an optimal set of products that the company should offer to its customers. Traditionally, it is a trade-off between offering larger assortments to maximize customer choice vs. smaller assortments to minimize costs associated with design, manufacturing, and distribution. Existing assortment planning models are quite lacking when it comes to configurable products such as automobiles and detail level of supply chain considerations. Further complications stem from increasingly strict environmental regulations and broader expectations for sustainable products and supply chains. We present a mixed-integer linear programming formulation for integrated assortment and supply chain network design models for automotive products to provide effective decision support and directional guidance to strategic product planners. Our models account for product use and supply chain emissions as well as fuel efficiency requirements. We also present an illustrative case study motivated by a global automaker to demonstrate the utility of the models and study the effects of sustainability requirements on the assortment and supply chain design.