Sustainable capacitated facility location/network design problem: a Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm based multiobjective approach

In a highly competitive environment, characterized by shorter product life cycles, mass customization and fluctuating markets, the supply chain network design is considered as one of the most important steps for reducing their costs, increasing their performance, competitiveness and profits. In addition, due to the growing social, governmental and industrial concerns about environmental protection and greenhouse gas reduction, policy makers are now forced to incorporate the environmental issue and sustainability constraints into their logistics network design process. The purpose of the present paper is to address the issue of sustainable supply-chain-network design by integrating simultaneously the strategic decisions related to the location of facilities with limited capacity and transport network design with capacity constraints on the links to be built, and constraints related to environmental protection. A multi-objective model is proposed to minimize the cost and environmental impact associated with transport activities by considering different environmental impacts of the links to be built. An adaptation of the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II, using mixed coding is developed to effectively solve the proposed model. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, a number of numerical experiments on instances of different sizes have been performed. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is presented to analyse the behaviour of the proposed model in response to changes in the key parameters of the problem.