Designing a dairy supply chain network considering sustainability and resilience: a multistage decision-making framework

Abstract

The crucial role of sustainable development and resiliency strategies is undeniable in today’s competitive market space, especially after the Coronavirus outbreak. Hence, this research develops a multistage decision-making framework to investigate the supply chain network design problem considering the sustainability and resiliency dimensions. In this way, the scores of the potential suppliers based on the sustainability and resilience dimensions were calculated using the MADM methods, and then, these scores were applied as inputs in the proposed mathematical model (the second stage), which determined which supplier should be selected. The proposed model aims to minimize the total costs, maximize the suppliers' sustainability and resiliency, and maximize the distribution centers' resiliency. Then, the proposed model is solved by the preemptive fuzzy goal programming method. Overall, the main objectives and aims of the current work are to present a comprehensive decision-making model that can incorporate the sustainability and resilience dimensions into the supplier selection and supply chain configuration processes. In general, the main contributions and advantages of this work can be summarized as follows: (i) this research simultaneously investigates the sustainability and resiliency concepts in the dairy supply chain, (ii) the current work develops an efficient multistage decision-making model that can evaluate the suppliers based on the resilience and sustainability dimensions and configure the supply chain network, simultaneously. Based on the obtained results, the responsiveness and facilities reinforcement indicators are the most important indicators for the resilient aspect. On the other hand, reliability and quality are the most important indicators of sustainability aspect. Also, the results show that a large percentage of supply chain costs are related to purchasing and production costs. Besides, according to the outputs, the total cost of supply chain increases by enhancing the demand. Graphical abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.].