A Perishable Product Sustainable Supply Chain Network Design Problem with Lead Time and Customer Satisfaction using a Hybrid Whale-Genetic Algorithm

In this research, designing a sustainable, multi-level, multi-products, and multi-period closed-loop supply chain network for perishable products is addressed. For this purpose, an integrated mathematical model is proposed. The main objectives are to minimize the production, distribution, and customer satisfaction related costs, minimize total CO₂ emissions, and maximize social responsibility. The contributions of this research include considering lead time for production and delivering perishable products in the supply chain network design problem, and proposing a novel hybrid algorithm based on whale optimization algorithm (WOA) and genetic algorithm (GA). To solve the problem and optimize the mathematical model, the proposed hybrid algorithm is implemented on several test problems in different sizes. The obtained results are compared with augmented epsilon constraint in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm provides Pareto solutions with acceptable quality and diversity.