Strategic and Tactical Evaluation of Conflicting Environment and Business Goals in Green Supply Chains

Abstract

Customer requirements and local legislation are forcing companies to provide green products and services. Such driving forces have resulted in the study of green supply chains (SCs), which are SCs that take into account factors that may cause positive or negative environmental impacts. However, some environmental indicators are often at odds with business goals, leading to a conflict, which, in order to optimize several goals simultaneously, is usually resolved by utilizing multicriteria decision analysis. Other modeling techniques describe systems by considering temporal aspects and causal relations. Such is the case of Petri nets, which were previously widely used to analyze performance in the context of SCs. This paper presents a method that combines the strengths of both techniques to assess the environmental and business indicators of such systems. This method adopts the exergy and the global warming potential key environmental indicators. A case study is conducted to demonstrate the application of the proposed modeling technique.