Designing a sustainable-resilient-responsive supply chain network considering uncertainty in the COVID-19 era.

Abstract

Effective supply chain management is crucial for economic growth, and sustainability is becoming a key consideration for large companies. COVID-19 has presented significant challenges to supply chains, making PCR testing a vital product during the pandemic. It detects the presence of the virus if you are infected at the time and detects fragments of the virus even after you are no longer infected. This paper proposes a multi-objective mathematical linear model to optimize a sustainable, resilient, and responsive supply chain for PCR diagnostic tests. The model aims to minimize costs, negative societal impact caused by shortages, and environmental impact, using a scenario-based approach with stochastic programming. The model is validated by investigating a real-life case study in one of Iran's high-risk supply chain areas. The proposed model is solved using the revised multi-choice goal programming method. Lastly, sensitivity analyses based on effective parameters are conducted to analyze the behavior of the developed Mixed-Integer Linear Programming. According to the results, not only is the model capable of balancing three objective functions, but it is also capable of providing resilient and responsive networks. To enhance the design of the supply chain network, this paper has considered various COVID-19 variants and their infectious rates, in contrast to prior studies that did not consider the variations in demand and societal impact exhibited by different virus variants.