Nowadays, the management in the food sector is facing dynamics and complexity in supply chains more than ever. Managers need to figure out new sustainability issues in their company in order to gain a competitive advantage. Planning and design of a food supply chain are associated with an integrated and complicated decision-making process. To design and evaluate the performance of a food supply chain, different criteria and conflicting objectives must be integrated. Besides, the decisions need to be taken at different levels (strategic, tactical and operation) and stages (supplier, manufacturing, distribution, and transportation).
Furthermore, the sector has been considered as the second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after energy, and it requires cutting the emissions from its growth. Not to mention that food supply chains are heavily associated with social structures since many players and agents are involved in this system. However, there have been few attempts to optimize economic, environmental and social concerns simultaneously, especially in food supply chains. Incorporating sustainability dimensions into decision making and finding a trade-off between objectives are challenging. This is even more challenging when a supply chain deals with issues related to perishability and seasonality. Therefore, a decision support tool that can consider all these aspects is required.
In this thesis, the aim is to propose a novel and more realistic approach to design sustainable supply chains. The primary objective of this thesis is to develop an integrated tactical-operational planning model for sustainable supply chains. First, we provide a supply chain model to support the tactical planning that integrates the three dimensions of sustainability: total cost, GHG emissions, and social responsibilities. Secondly, we extend our model in order to ensure a more realistic representation of the supply chain considered in this research by proposing a multi-objective optimization model. A solution methodology is developed to cope with multiple conflicting objectives in reasonable solution time. In addition, the operation of a supply chain network is simulated using a discrete-event simulation model to analyze the supply chain network configuration obtained from the tactical planning model. The tactical optimization model can get insights on the best network configuration which combined with the operational simulation model helps realize the practicability of a given configuration and sustainable strategy. Eventually, this study propose an integrated approach to validate the decisions made at the tactical planning level and ensure the feasibility of sustainability goals in both planning levels. This work gives researchers and practitioners insights on how to design/redesign a sustainable supply chain and evaluate supply chain performance in order to achieve sustainability goals.
| Date | 10 Jan 2019 |
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| Original language | American English |
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| Awarding Institution | - École de technologie supérieure
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| Supervisor | Amin Chaabane (Supervisor) & Jacqueline Bloemhof-Ruwaard (Co-supervisor) |
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Geramianfar, R. (Author),
Chaabane (Supervisor) & Bloemhof-Ruwaard (Co-supervisor),
10 Jan 2019Student thesis: Doctoral thesis › Doctorate in Engineering: Engineering