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Research on the development of sustainable supply chain models is highly active nowadays. Merging the concept of supply chain management with sustainable development goals, leads to simultaneous consideration of all economic, environmental and social factors. This paper addresses the design of a sustainable closed-loop supply chain including suppliers, manufacturers, distribution centers, customer zones, and disposal centers considering the consumption of energy. In addition, the distribution centers play the roles of warehouse and collection centers. The problem involves three choices of remanufacturing, recycling, and disposing the returned items. The objectives are including the total profit, energy consumption and the number of created job opportunities. As far as we know, these objectives are rarely considered in a sustainable closed-loop supply chain model. The proposed model also responds to the customer demand and also addresses the real-life constraints for location, allocation and inventory decisions in a closed-loop supply chain framework. Another novelty of this research is to develop a set of efficient Lagrangian relaxation reformulations and fast heuristics for solving a real-world numerical example. The results have revealed that the obtained solution is feasible and the developed solution algorithm is highly efficient for solving supply chain models. Finally, a comprehensive discussion is provided to highlight our findings and managerial insights from our results.

Viability is the ability of a supply chain (SC) to maintain itself and survive in a changing environment through a redesign of structures and replanning of performance with long-term impacts. In this paper, we theorize a new notion—the viable supply chain (VSC). In our approach, viability is considered as an underlying SC property spanning three perspectives, i.e., agility, resilience, and sustainability. The principal ideas of the VSC model are adaptable structural SC designs for supply–demand allocations and, most importantly, establishment and control of adaptive mechanisms for transitions between the structural designs. Further, we demonstrate how the VSC components can be categorized across organizational, informational, process-functional, technological, and financial structures. Moreover, our study offers a VSC framework within an SC ecosystem. We discuss the relations between resilience and viability. Through the lens and guidance of dynamic systems theory, we illustrate the VSC model at the technical level. The VSC model can be of value for decision-makers to design SCs that can react adaptively to both positive changes (i.e., the agility angle) and be able to absorb negative disturbances, recover and survive during short-term disruptions and long-term, global shocks with societal and economical transformations (i.e., the resilience and sustainability angles). The VSC model can help firms in guiding their decisions on recovery and re-building of their SCs after global, long-term crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. We emphasize that resilience is the central perspective in the VSC guaranteeing viability of the SCs of the future. Emerging directions in VSC research are discussed.

One of the key issues in supply chain sustainability is the efficient usage of the available resources. At the same time, proactive supply chain design with disruption risk considerations frequently leads to a network redundancy which implies some resource reservations in anticipation of possible disruptions. Even if resilient supply chain design has received much attention in literature, there is a research gap in designing both resilient and sustainable supply chains. This study contributes to closing the given gap by proposing a novel methodological approach to modelling network redundancy optimization. This allows for simultaneous computation of both optimal network redundancy and proactive contingency plans, considering both supply dynamics and structural disruption risks. The novelties of this study are the integration of sustainable resource utilization and SC resilience based on coordination of structure- and flow-oriented optimization. The model uncovers a practical approach to analyze and optimize supply chain redundancy by varying processing intensities of resource consumption in the network according to supply and structural dynamics. This makes it possible to explicitly include the dynamics of resource consumption for contingency plan realization in disruption scenarios.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak shows that pandemics and epidemics can seriously wreak havoc on supply chains (SC) around the globe. Humanitarian logistics literature has extensively studied epidemic impacts; however, there exists a research gap in understanding of pandemic impacts in commercial SCs. To progress in this direction, we present a systematic analysis of the impacts of epidemic outbreaks on SCs guided by a structured literature review that collated a unique set of publications. The literature review findings suggest that influenza was the most visible epidemic outbreak reported, and that optimization of resource allocation and distribution emerged as the most popular topic. The streamlining of the literature helps us to reveal several new research tensions and novel categorizations/classifications. Most centrally, we propose a framework for operations and supply chain management at the times of COVID-19 pandemic spanning six perspectives, i.e., adaptation, digitalization, preparedness, recovery, ripple effect, and sustainability. Utilizing the outcomes of our analysis, we tease out a series of open research questions that would not be observed otherwise. Our study also emphasizes the need and offers directions to advance the literature on the impacts of the epidemic outbreaks on SCs framing a research agenda for scholars and practitioners working on this emerging research stream.

This paper investigates a dynamic supply chain model in which a supplier decides both the wholesale price and the green process innovation investments while a manufacturer sets the retail price. We refer to Industry 4.0 technologies like Robotics, Automated Guided Vehicles and 3D printing, which allow firms to reduce the amount of resources wasted and the emissions, generating an overall environmental benefit as well as a reduction of the marginal production cost. The environmental performance positively influences the demand, which leads to larger production volume and in turn damages the environmental performance via negative externalities (e.g., emissions). We resolve this operational trade-off and compare an uncoordinated setting to a revenue sharing contract complemented by a collaborative program. We show that the overall benefit of environmental cooperation in green process innovation entails the existence of a profit-Pareto-improving region. Nevertheless, the maximum environmental performance fails to occur in the profit-Pareto-improving region, which shows the mismatch between economic and environmental performance. Moreover, a wholesale price contract might help to enhance environmental performance while supply chains might prefer a revenue sharing contract or vertical integrated chain to maximize profits.

In order to attain competitive advantage, it is of high importance for firms to move towards sustainability. In practice, an efficient sustainable closed-loop supply chain (SCLSC) can reduce the negative effects of hazardous wastes and consequently improve the environmental dimension of sustainability. Besides the environmental dimension, the social aspect of sustainability can be achieved through initiating corporate social responsibility and enhancing social welfare of customers. Different from the existing literature, this paper proposes an analytical coordination model to not only cover all three dimensions of sustainability in a SCLSC but also to align different decisions made in competitive forward and reverse logistics. The proposed SCLSC is modeled under decentralized, centralized, and coordinated decision-making structures considering different game behaviors in the forward and reverse links. The results reveal that the proposed two-way two-part tariff (TWTPT) contract is of high benefit to the sustainable CLSC as it is able to simultaneously enhance the environmental, economic, and social performances. To be more precise, the proposed model improves the collection rate, consumer surplus, social welfare, and profits of all CLSC members. In addition, our findings demonstrate the applicability and efficiency of the proposed TWTPT contract in motivating the agents of both competitive forward and reverse chains to participate in the coordination scheme.

This article addresses certain gaps highlighted in the literature relating to the investigation of supplier selection through a theoretical lens, based on contextual factors, institutional pressure, and industrial features. Consequently, this article sheds light on how a government’s strategic plans can drive organisations to incorporate elements of social sustainability into their supply chains. A successful case from Oman which demonstrates the social dimension of sustainability in selecting suppliers in the oil and gas sector is presented, along with the government’s role and the mechanisms it has applied. A survey of purchasing, procurement and supply chain managers in Oman’s major oil and gas organisations was conducted, along with interviews. The results of this research were further analysed through the lens of institutional theory, addressing a genuine research gap. It was found that: (a) coercive governmental pressure is not sufficient to truly develop socially sustainable practices in organisations if the organisations themselves do not show initiative, as this leads to compliant rather than innovative practice; and (b) policy makers need to be aware that coercive pressure alone does not lead to continuous improvement of social sustainability performance, due to the ceiling effect, i.e. organisations meeting only the minimum governmental requirements.

This research addresses the timely challenge of climate changes by investigating how a carbon emissions taxation scheme can be designed to reduce carbon emissions without hindering long-term economic development. Considering different power structures and green technology investment efficiencies, this research examines the optimal carbon tax design with respect to several key supply chain features. Our findings show that no matter whether customers are sensitive to the carbon emissions or not, the carbon tax should be differentiated across industry sectors, and the supply chain power structure and cost efficiencies in carbon emissions reduction should be taken into account. It is also crucial to have the proper channel leadership to achieve the sustainability objectives.

In this paper, we investigate a manufacturer’s encroachment decision in a dual-channel supply chain with substitutable green products. The manufacturer makes green investment and pricing decisions and sells through its own retail store as well as an independent retailer. We make a major contribution by incorporating consumer green awareness as well as product competition into game-theoretic models of the dual-channel supply chain. Specifically, we explicitly analyze the impacts of consumer green awareness and product substitutability on profitability, social welfare, and environmental performance of the supply chain and its firms. Our main findings include the followings. First, with encroachment, higher consumer green awareness and product substitutability always benefit the manufacturer. However, they benefit the retailer only when the manufacturer encroachment cost is sufficiently high. Second, for the green manufacturer, the encroachment strategy can outperform the no-encroachment strategy in terms of profitability, social welfare, and environmental performance. We also employ numerical examples to further illustrate our analytical findings and gain more managerial and policy insights.

Nowadays, in business operations achieving sustainable development goals is critically important. With the proper use of information, supply chain management can significantly help enhance sustainability. In this paper, we analytically study a supply chain model where a manufacturer produces a green product and sells it to the end consumers through a retailer. We formulate the analytical model as a Stackelberg game. In the game, the manufacturer is the Stackelberg leader who decides the wholesale price and product sustainability level, and the retailer is the follower who reacts by setting the retail price. After deriving the Stackelberg equilibrium of the wholesale price, the product sustainability level, and the retail price in the closed form expressions, we compare the manufacturer’s, the retailer’s, and the whole supply chain’s performances. We derive and compare the equilibria under three business scenarios, including Decentralized Supply Chain with Non-information Sharing (Scenario N), Decentralized Supply Chain with Information Sharing (Scenario I), and Centralized Supply Chain (Scenario C). We give managerial suggestions to the manufacturer and the retailer on how to promote the green products and achieve organizational sustainability goals. We also analytically illustrate how to coordinate the channel, and highlight the crucial role played by information in the green product supply chain.