Coordinated Sustainable Product and Supply Chain Design and Modeling

Abstract: Sustainability in business operations calls for making the products, processes and the systems, i.e. the entire supply chain, more sustainable. Therefore, to achieve continued profitability while ensuring environmental protection and societal well-being, it is imperative that product design and process design be integrated and, simultaneously, product design and supply chain design be coordinated. The former, in the way of concurrent engineering, has received considerable attention in recent times. However, the design of effective sustainable supply chains (SSC's), from a total sustainability perspective, where the strategic optimization of supply chain design is to be integrated with sustainable product design is still lacking. This is partly due to businesses not recognizing the significance of coordinated product and supply chain design (for sustainability) and also because of the sheer daunting complexity of the modeling task. Contributing significantly to this complexity are such factors as uncertainties in timing, quality and quantity of returns, stochastic routings of reverse flows for closed-loop SSC's using reverse logistics and the problematic task of quantifying product, process and SC impact on difficult-to-quantify areas like environmental and societal wellbeing. This paper will present an integrated approach to the quantitative modeling and evaluation of coordinated sustainable product and supply chain design considering the 6R-based (reduce, reuse, recycle, recover, redesign and remanufacture) approach to closed-loop material flow.