An integration of environmental awareness into flexible supply chains: a trade-off between costs and environmental pollution

Today, environmental awareness is highly interested in supply chains and logistics networks with regard to sustainable development goals. This proposes a bi-objective linear mathematical model comprising supply chain flexibility dimensions. The proposed model is to integrate environmental considerations into a flexible supply chain as an optimization framework. The first objective function is to minimize the costs, while the second one minimizes the environmental impacts of automotive industry. The goal of this paper is to find a trade-off between the total cost and the environmental pollution with regard to the supply chain flexibility dimensions. We suggest adding four different supply chain flexibility dimensions to the model which are budget for transportation, trained labor team to help the packaging process, number of active plants, and outsourcing the painting process flexibilities to curb harmful emissions from factories while reducing the costs. Six flexibility scenarios are proposed in this study to do the sensitivity analysis. The model is applicable with the use of a real data set derived from an automotive parts factory located in Iran. We use an improved augmented ε-constraint method to address the proposed bi-objective optimization framework. The results show that choosing the model with all flexibility dimensions is the best initiative to promote sustainable development, since it leads to a significant reduction in costs and environmental pollution.