Sustainable multi-channel supply chain design: an intuitive fuzzy game theory approach to deal with uncertain business environment

Abstract

By introducing the concept of sustainable development, managers and policymakers in many industries have been encouraged to consider environmental and social issues in addition to economic objectives in their planning. Following this concept, sustainable supply chain management has become the main concern of many studies. Among all the strategies to achieve sustainability targets in a supply chain, cooperating with third-party logistics companies has attracted lots of attention. By providing more sustainable and efficient transportation services, 3PLs can help all types of regular, closed-loop, and circular SCs achieve more profit, while they are still sustainable, at least in distribution and collection/recycling stages. This study investigates the sustainable multi-channel SC design problem in the presence of the government and 3PLs. To bring the present study closer to the real-world situation, the problem is modeled using an intuitionistic fuzzy uncertainty approach. Considering the government as the leader of the SC in two centralized and decentralized decision structures, game theory has been applied to model the game between players and obtain optimal decision values. For the first time in the literature, public awareness toward green activities of the players, emission reduction, uncertainty, and delivery time have been considered in this study. The results show the presence of a 3PL will reduce the delivery time and the amount of pollution. Also, the findings confirm that governments can control the players' activities and encourage them to apply green strategies using financial tools.

Impact of the IoT Integration and Sustainability on Competition Within an Oligopolistic 3PL Market

“…The introduction of the sustainable development concept has motivated managers and policymakers across various sectors to incorporate environmental and social concerns alongside economic goals in their strategic planning [14]. It has become vital to improve the design and management of supply chain and logistics methods.…”

“…Out of all the methods to meet sustainability objectives within a supply chain, collaborating with third-party logistics firms has garnered considerable interest. Through the delivery of environmentally friendly and effective transportation services, 3PLs can assist various types of supply chains, including regular, closed loop, and circular ones, in achieving higher profits while maintaining sustainability, particularly in the distribution and collection/recycling phases [14]. Consequently, the pursuit of sustainable practices by thirdparty logistics (3PLs) companies has evolved into a substantial and intricate issue [22].…”

“…Supply chain remains a complex system considering it involves numerous players or groups of decision-makers, ergo they are suitable to be examined through the prism of Game theory [28]. This latter provides a framework for modelling these complex interactions and has been widely used among researchers in analyzing supply chain issues [14], [28], [29].…”

“…Price is one of the main criteria considered in decision making [14], hence game models for pricing problems is mature [30]. Multiple games in the literature have dealt with pricing in logistics under various factors in addition to costs variables, namely sustainability indicators, risk, competition indicators etc.…”

“…Investigating pricing strategies considering the environmental sustainability, closed loop supply chain and green production has been the focus of various papers [5], [14], [29], [31], [32]. [33].…”