How to Incorporate Sustainability Criteria into Operations Management Models? The Sustainable Order Quantity Example
Résumé
Even if sustainable development (SD) is nowadays a must-have for operations management (OM) literature, model-based research that includes SD criteria is scarce. This paper thus presents a novel approach for integrating sustainability criteria into operations management models based on two main observations. First of all, the definition of SD requires formulating the problem as a multiobjective optimization one. Moreover, decisions may be taken several times a day in the OM context. In this setting, the procedure should quickly end up with a unique solution. To do so, the firm may provide preference information that can be added to the model based on multi-criteria decision analysis methods. Our contribution is thus twofold. First, the proposed interactive procedure provides a strong support to include SD criteria into OM models. Moreover, the procedure is a new combination of multi-criteria decision analysis techniques.