Toward a safe supply chain: Incorporating accident, physical, psychosocial, and mental overload risks into supply chain network

TL;DR

This paper integrates health and safety risks into supply chain network design using a multi-objective mixed integer linear programming model, aiming to enhance safety, reduce environmental impact, and control costs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-objective model that incorporates accident, physical, psychosocial, and mental overload risks into supply chain design, connecting occupational safety research with supply chain management.

Findings

Incorporating safety factors reduces health and safety risks for workers.

The model balances safety, environmental, and cost objectives effectively.

Decision makers are provided with multiple optimal supply chain configurations.

Abstract

Considering health and safety factors in supply chain network design brings safer place for employer and help firm to have better image in the society. There are many health and safety factors overlooked by literature studies of supply chain. This paper takes advantage of the results of occupational safety and health in the transport sector studies and connect this field of science with the supply chain network design. This study incorporates health and safety factors such as accident, physical, psychosocial and mental overload risks as an objective function beside cost and environmental oriented objective functions. We formulated a multi-objective closed loop supply chain network as a mixed integer linear programming model and customized augmented epsilon-constraint algorithm to solve our multi-objective problem to offer multiple choices for decision makers. Eventually, we analyzed the effects of incorporating health and safety factors in supply chain and demonstrated how it will minimize the health and safety risks of supply chain employers, environmental pollution, and the total cost of the network simultaneously.