Sustainable optimisation of SMEs closed-loop supply chain for lithium battery manufacturing

Abstract

Maintaining the sustainability of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) supply chain has positive impact on society. Under the ripple effect, the vulnerability of the SMEs supply chain and the collaboration uncertainty of participants have potentially negative impact on the sustainability that cannot be ignored. We consider the closed-loop SMEs supply chain network design based on the risk propagation to improve the triple sustainability. The basis of the simulation model structure is a bi-level multi-objective mixed-integer linear programming model that aims to maximise triple sustainability, and an improved dynamic non-dominated genetic algorithm (DNSGA2) is designed to solve the problem. An SMEs supply chain for closed-loop manufacturing of lithium batteries in China was considered. The results show that the centralised SMEs supply chain preform better when the supply-demand imbalance, and the distributed network structure is preform better in maintaining sustainability when manufacturer capacity imbalances. Supply chain managers should develop more flexible strategies based on the structure of downstream demand, increasing upstream manufacturers' participation to enhance their viability and improve the sustainability of the supply chain.