SEMINAR 1 October 2012: Dolores Romero-Morales, University of Oxford

Reducing the Carbon Footprint of Supply Chains: A bi-objective approach

Abstract

Nowadays companies try to reduce their carbon footprint. Bearing in mind this environmental awareness, the choice of a production plan can be modeled as a Bi-Objective Economic Lot-Sizing problem, in which we aim to minimize the total supply chain costs, as well as minimizing the maximum emission across blocks of a given length. In this talk, I first show that finding a single Pareto efficient outcome is, in general, an NP-hard task. We then identify non-trivial classes of problem instances for which this problem is polynomially solvable. We end by showing how our results can be used to approximate the Pareto frontier, and therefore the tradeoff between supply chain costs and emissions.