Bilevel optimization with sustainability perspective: A survey on applications

TL;DR

This survey reviews the integration of bilevel optimization techniques into sustainability-related applications across various domains, highlighting recent advances and future research opportunities.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of sustainable bilevel optimization applications, including classifications, methodologies, and open research questions.

Findings

Classified applications in transportation, water, agriculture, and supply chains.

Discussed solution methodologies for sustainable bilevel problems.

Outlined future research opportunities in the domain.

Abstract

Bilevel optimization, a well-established field for modeling hierarchical decision-making problems, has recently intersected with sustainability studies and practices, resulting in a series of works focusing on bilevel optimization problems involving multiple decision makers with diverse economic, environmental, and social objectives. This survey offers a comprehensive overview of sustainable bilevel optimization applications. First, we introduce the main concepts related to the nature of bilevel optimization problems and present some typical mathematical formulations for bilevel pricing problems that cover many of the collected applications. Then, we review the most relevant works published in sustainable bilevel optimization, giving a classification based on the application domains and their association with well-known operations research problems, while briefly discussing the proposed solution methodologies. We survey applications on transportation and logistics, production planning and manufacturing, water, waste, and agriculture management, supply chains, and disaster prevention and response. Finally, we outline a list of open questions and opportunities for future research in this domain.