A coupled evaluation and optimization approach to drive product variety towards sustainability

Abstract

Increasing customer demands for highly personalized and environmentally friendly products urge companies to find new ways for managing their production systems. The aim is to cope with diversity of items while delivering profitable products with lower environmental impact. This paper proposes a coupled evaluation and optimization approach to steer product variety towards environmental and economic sustainability. A predefined set of indicators enriched with weights given by the user ensures the evaluation, while optimization uses linear programming. The paper highlights the impact of variety steering on environmental and economic sustainability indicators. Additionally, the paper underlines the need to translate regulations into concrete company goals through integrating carbon markets into the proposed model.

Keywords: sustainability, evaluation, variety, linear programming, analytic hierarchy process