Sustainable supply chains design, planning and optimization: State of art, challenges and opportunities

The growing concern about sustainable development in recent years has led companies as well as scientists to address the corresponding issues and challenges for the design and management of supply chains. There has already been a significant amount of published works in this domain, both in management and engineering journals. We present a review of the published works related to the design and planning of sustainable supply chain networks, focusing on the utilization of quantitative models and optimization techniques for these problems. After situating our review within the contexts of supply chain design problems and sustainable development concerns, we describe and classify the published works according to the joint consideration of the economic factors and at least one of the environmental or social factors, including works pertaining to reverse logistics. We present the works according to a classification of the modelling approaches used, i.e. deterministic or stochastic models with a single or multiple objectives. Then the main solution techniques are analysed, with a focus on multi-objective optimization. We also review a variety of real-life applications implementing sustainable supply chain network design problems in different sectors such as biofuels, chemical processes, waste management, steel and aluminium, medical items, white goods, retail, electronics, paper, vehicles, containers. We conclude by mentioning a number of challenges and research directions.