DEVELOPING RESILIENT GREEN SUPPLY CHAIN MODEL USING AHP AND MULTI-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION

Abstract

Supply chain management plays a vital role in business processes and economic performance. The supply chain management ensures continuous operation of supply and demand cycles in the business operation and aims to maximize the profitability and customer satisfaction for the firm. However, the industries in both developing and developed nations are currently facing increasing pressure to consider environmental aspects in managing their business operations because of the increased awareness of environmental issues worldwide. Thus, the increasing environmental concerns particularly carbon emissions, environmental degradation and climate change are putting increasing onus on the industries to be more sensitive to environmental issues and adopt advanced technologies and proactive environmentally friendly business operations and strategies. The other major emerging concern in supply chain process is regarding how to deal with the disruptions resulting from natural disasters such as cyclones, floods, earthquakes, tsunamic, etc., pandemic situations like covid-19, and war scenarios as they affect the supply chain process badly and it may bring sometimes even breakdown. These situations are highly unpredictable and cause large uncertainties and disruptions that affect the business and economy severely. These disruptions and environmental impacts may be long lasting and global and may even sweep across all industries. Thus, it becomes essentially imperative to develop strategic models for the integrated planning and management that also accounts such challenging issues of environment and disruptions and are not targeted only on the profitability and customer satisfaction. The literature review reveals that there are very limited studies and business models that efficiently guide the supply chain process how to respond to environmental concerns and disruptions for the success and sustainability of business. Globalization has already increased the challenges of supply chains and the decision-making in emerging scenarios of environment and disruptions has become very complex involving multi-faceted criteria and vi goals. Keeping the above viewpoints, the present study is aimed to develop a resilient green supply chain model using AHP and multi-objective optimization that accounts the drivers and barriers of environmental and disruptions aspects besides the profitability and customer satisfaction in the overall framework of supply chain management. The study includes empirical evaluation, model development, case study and model application to a pilot demonstrative study through numerical analysis and interpretation. The study is important to find out the strategic enablers which can be taken up by an organization related to environmental aspects and supply chain disruptions to ensure future readiness and sustainable development of the organization. Thus, such a model will ensure to remain competitive by reducing manufacturing and operational cost as well as enhancing environmental performance, reliability, customer satisfaction, societal acceptance, and overall profit.