Integrating sustainability in supply chain planning and decision-making processes

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The objective of this research program is to develop new approaches to address the challenging problem of sustainability principles integration into supply chain planning and collaborative planning. Usually, the supply chain performance is purely economic. Considering environmental and social aspects transforms the performance to a three-dimensional concept, which leads to complex planning problems: each dimension might encompass multiple criteria, which might be conflictual; compromises are thus required. Each criterion should be measured by a relevant indicator. This is challenging because many criteria are involved and these indicators are measured in different units and measuring scales. Some of them are dependent. Finding compromises in a collaborative framework adds complexity: to ensure the collaboration success, the decision-makers and stakeholders need to reach a consensus and mutual advantages that are greater than individual advantages, in regards to sustainability criteria. Fairness among players regarding “the sharing of benefits and risks” from all economic, environmental and social perspectives must be ensured. This problem has been mainly studied from the economic perspective. Finally, the decision-makers and stakeholders might have different backgrounds and goals, and might perceive the planning problem from very different perspectives. ******All these aspects inevitably leads to large, non-linear, multiple-criteria and multiple-actors planning problems. Multi-objective optimization is an appropriate approach for dealing with this multidisciplinary problem. In the literature, the approaches proposed often lead to single objective optimization and economic-driven models. Only few studies consider social criteria in the mathematical formulations. Trade-offs between all three sustainability performances are rarely generated and analyzed. The impact of sustainability integration into supply chain planning on collaboration is not sufficiently studied. The managers and stakeholder' sustainability goals are rarely considered and few real case studies have been reported in the literature. This research program aims to: 1) develop new multi-objective optimization models to efficiently model sustainable and collaborative supply chain planning problems. 2) Develop new methods and algorithms to solve the formulated problems and facilitate the visualization of the results. 3) Develop new methods for sh aring the sustainable benefits of collaboration while ensuring fairness among all players. 4) Design efficient planning processes to support decision-making in collaboration context. 5) Apply the approaches and methods developed to cases studies in the forest sector, where sustainability concerns are of high importance and the supply chain networks and planning processes are complex and unique. The results will be generalized to other sectors.