Environmental and societal assessments for sustainable product and supply chain design

Decision support models for integrating sustainable product and Supply Chain (SC) design that evaluate alternate product designs and their SC configurations can help a company to identify the best product design and the corresponding SC configuration (PDSCC) that maximizes the economic, environmental and societal benefits. A decision support model developed using a hierarchical approach for selecting the best PDSCC with maximum sustainability benefits is discussed. This model considers a total life-cycle approach and promotes a closed-loop flow over Multiple Life-Cycles (MLCs). Given that PDSCCs which maximizes economic performance have been chosen through optimization and that economic MLC analysis has been performed, this paper presents a detailed description of how the environmental and societal MLC analysis can be performed to identify the best PDSCC combinations that also have minimal environmental and societal impact.