Addressing a sustainable production-distribution supply chain network design problem considering carbon emissions policies by a hybrid whale optimization algorithm
Today’s world has seen a further attention in the area of sustainability to integrate whole business networks in an efficient way. Regulations of carbon emissions and the sustainability dimensions enforce the decision-makers of supply chain networks to redesign their systems based on these factors. Such difficulties motivate us to develop a sustainable productiondistribution supply chain network design problem considering carbon emissions policies among the first studies in this area. Accordingly, a mixed integer non-linear programming model has been developed. To tackle the proposed problem, its complexity increases exponentially while the size of problem increase. Hence, another innovation of this work is to introduce a new hybrid metaheuristic based on whale optimization algorithm as a recent successful optimizer to solve the complex and non-linear problems. The collaboration of applied algorithms has been designed by Taguchi method, satisfactorily. A comprehensive analysis has been evaluated through a comparative study along with some sensitivity analyses.
