Sustainable Inventory Management in Supply Chains: Trends and Further Research

Abstract

This article presents an overview of the models applied to sustainable inventory management in supply chains and a roadmap for new research. It aims to address the lack of understanding of how sustainability is being incorporated into quantitative inventory management models in the supply chain context. The study is based on a classification of the reviewed literature according to the following criteria: supply chain structure, environmental approach, problem type, modeling, and solution approach. As a result, 36 articles were analyzed and classified. The main findings show that studies that incorporate social sustainability into inventory management along supply chains are lacking, while environmental studies are a growing research area. Uncertainty issues also need to be incorporated into sustainable inventory management models. Another important result of this study is the definition of a roadmap with trends and future research guidelines. The identified future research guidelines include incorporating decisions that can help to improve economic, environmental, and social sustainability. Thus, future studies should focus on both following quantitative models that incorporate inventory decisions integrally with transportation and location decisions, and more complex models, and employing new algorithms and heuristics to solve them.

Designing a Resilient–Sustainable Supply Chain Network of Age-Differentiated Blood Platelets Using Vertical–Horizontal Transshipment and Grey Wolf Optimizer

“…Sustainable design of supply chains can help organizations achieve competitive advantages [31,32]. Gunpinar and Centeno [33] proposed a two-stage BPSCN comprising a hospital and a blood bank, and presented an integer programming model considering platelet freshness.…”

Achieving sustainability through multifaceted green functions in manufacturing

“…Firms have a substantial role in the environment while accomplishing their sustainable goals, which indicates going green (Tseng et al , 2019). The concept of green is associated with sustainability (Ezuma et al , 2022), which emphasizes the green development perspective led by a green SC, such as sustainability shift, firm’s concern for environmental aspects after receiving extensive distress from related parties (Becerra et al , 2022; Li et al , 2020; Li et al , 2022; Liao and Widowati, 2021; Rupa and Saif, 2022; Pal et al , 2023). Panigrahi et al (2018) reviewed the sustainable SC to achieve social, environmental and economic sustainability.…”

Inventory Transshipment Considering Greenhouse Gas Emissions for Sustainable Cross-Filling in Cold Supply Chains

“…For replenishing and recycling perishable goods, lateral transshipment was investigated [16,17]. Numerous studies have explored sustainable inventory management with a focus on lateral transshipment [18][19][20][21]. Several combined transshipment and production control policies were proposed, including a policy for multilocation systems [22,23].…”