Modelling sustainable procurement problem: a goal-based approach

Abstract

Sustainable procurement problem not only considers traditional parameters such as purchasing cost, ordering cost, holding cost, and logistics cost but also considers non-traditional parameters such as carbon emission cost, thus, making it a multi-objective optimisation problem. However, in competitive business scenario, organisations have also some set targets for various traditional and non-traditional parameters making the procurement process a goal oriented one. These goals in turn make the overall procurement problem conflicting while the organisation tries to achieve all these goals with minimum deviations. Therefore, this paper is a novel attempt to optimise multi-objective sustainable procurement problem (MoSPP) in presence of various goals using goal programming approach and is referred as Multi_Goal_SPP. The goals for goal programming formulation are computed through MoSPP. The methodology is demonstrated through two illustrative examples solved in LINGO 10. Multi_Goal_SPP establishes optimal trade-off between conflicting goals set by organisation. The proposed model ensures the minimum total deviation from goals required to meet specified demand.