Application of Circular Economy and Uncertainty Planning in Analyzing the Sustainable Closed-Loop Supply Chain Network Design

Supply chain sustainability as a new and very effective approach has recently attracted the attention of researchers in the field of supply chain management. Also, a circular economy helps to reduce the waste materials and products in a supply chain. In order to include circular economy in supply chain network design, it is necessary to use the concept of closed-loop network design. Therefore, designing a sustainable closed-loop supply chain network that works well even by changing some parameters seems to be necessary. This paper presents a multiproduct, sustainable closed-loop supply chain network under uncertainty. First, a mathematical model is proposed to design a closed-loop network, and then a set of possible scenarios is used to deal with the uncertainty of the parameters. In order to show the validity and applicability of the proposed model, numerical examples are presented and analyzed. In this regard, numerical results show the appropriate performance of the proposed model. Finally, sensitivity analysis is performed to assess the role of customer demand in different aspects of sustainability. It is revealed that increasing customer demand will have a strong impact on economic and environmental objectives.