Goal-based approach for environmentally sustainable stochastic procurement problem

Due to volatile business environment, manufacturing firms regularly face huge challenges in adapting to market uncertainties, increased competition and environmental legislations imposed by governments. Therefore, there is a need to capture the uncertainties in various parameters while keeping firm's own interest of maximising profitability by minimising overall costs. This paper considers a multi period procurement problem of a firm operating in a carbon sensitive and uncertain business environment procuring multiple items from multiple vendors using multiple carriers. The firm is having limited carbon quota exceeding which carbon credits must be bought. The paper proposes a goal-based approach for environmentally sustainable procurement problem (Goal_ESSP). The Goal_ESSP model addresses the firm's interests by putting various targets as goals and establishing an optimal trade-off among various goal targets. The proposed Goal_ESSP model considers stochastic parameter to capture uncertainties. Finally, the Goal_ESSP model is demonstrated using three illustrations which are solved in LINGO 10.