Sustainable and reliable closed-loop supply chain network design: Normalized Normal Constraint (NNC) method application

The competitive environment of the present age has focused the attention of organizations on meeting the requirements of quality and socially responsible, because organizations that adhere to the quality management framework achieve a higher level of customer satisfaction. In addition, the shorter product life due to the development of technology and changing customer needs reveals the need to pay attention to the concepts of sustainability and reliability in the design of the supply chain network. In this paper, the convergence of sustainability and reliability in supply chains is considered and a model of economic, responsible, and reliable supply chain is comprehensively and efficiently modeled. For this purpose, a nonlinear mixed-integer programming model for the supply chain network design problem is considered as three-objective, multi-product, multi-level, multi-source, multi-capacity, and multi-stage. In this study, the normalized normal constraint (NNC) method is used to solve the proposed multi-objective optimization problem and find Pareto optimal solutions. In addition, numerical examples with random data in different dimensions have been considered to measure the accuracy and overall performance of the proposed model and by changing the various parameters of the model, the sensitivity analysis of target functions has been performed to analyze the model behavior.