Decision support for collaboration planning in sustainable supply chains

Organizations have to deal with increasing challenges in their supply chains. Their decision makers brought to balance economic performance with environmental and social issues. Methods and concepts for jointly optimizing economic, environmental and social cost of operations in supply chains are challenging. Decision support systems could help organizations to support sustainability in their supply chains. A collaborative decision-making framework for sustainable supply chain planning is proposed in this paper. This framework facilitates the development of multi-party collaborative relationships across a network to improve the sustainability of delivered products. It supports a new Information and Communication Technology (ICT) system platform. The platform provides insight for infrastructure and visibility to support supply chain sustainability requirements. The proposed decision support system proposes simultaneously collaboration and sustainability functionalities missing in many existing supply chain planning systems. This system has been evaluated and validated through a pilot program across a range of food supply networks. The work is motivated and applied by a major European research program in the agri-food supply chain.