Principal Investigator David Simchi-Levi
This project focuses on developing mathematical programming models to investigate the impact of new environmental legislations on product supply chains, including regulations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, waste, and the use of nonrenewable inputs. Most of the resulting models are NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems and are practically too difficult to solve optimally.Therefore, several heuristic techniques that aim to find near-optimal or high-quality solutions within a reasonable computation time will be developed. Using these fast techniques we will be able to conduct sensitivity analysis that is helpful in making robust decisions especially under the existence of uncertainty in the models' parameters.
Research Objectives:(*) The development of tools and techniques that enable modeling and analysis of the interaction between supply chain and environmental management.(*) Application of these tools to understand critical tradeoffs and alternatives in controlling supply chain carbon footprint.
Impact on Global Sustainability are: (*) Helping business stakeholders to understand the environmental impacts related to their supply chain strategies and practices.(* Providing tools for enabling consumers to understand the environmental impacts associated with different products.(*) Reducing environmental impacts from supply chains by means of providing an incentive to suppliers to differentiate their products.
Current major focus is on conducting a thorough literature review on managing CO2 emissions in a supply chain context.