A taxonomy-based functional model development for sustainable supply chain design

Adopting sustainable supply chain (SSC) practices requires manufacturers to consider the whole supply chain, both up-stream and down-stream. In addition, it requires a total product life-cycle approach that considers the four product life-cycle stages: pre-manufacturing, manufacturing, use and post-use. The total-product life-cycle approach entails applying the 6Rs (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Recover, Redesign and Remanufacture) to achieve the ideal case of closed-loop material flow in sustainable supply chains. Supply chain design is an important aspect of SSC practices. Research to develop quantitative supply chain design models has been increasing. However, deficiency in modeling sustainable supply chains still exists. As a result, manufacturers depend on over-simplified models or rules of thumb for decision making. This is mainly due to the high degree of complexity in material and product flow and uncertainty in supplies and demands of recovered and remanufactured products. In addition, these operations have not been well defined at a high level of detail. Therefore, a formal definition of SSCs that provides a detailed description of the operations, flows, controls and performance measures in SSCs is required. This paper will present a functional model that defines the SSC process and provides a basis to develop quantitative analytical SSC models. The model will incorporate the total life-cycle approach by considering the four stages and will capture the principal parts of SSCs by defining the key elements: processes, material flow, information flow, decisions and performance measures. In addition, the model will be decomposed hierarchically to provide more details of the operations and flows in SSCs. The model will be developed using the standardized IDEF0 modeling technique.