Benefits of Preservation, Green and Quality Improvement Investment for Waste Management in Sustainable Supply Chain under Fuzzy Learning and Inflation

Abstract

In the modern world, waste management, incorporating the quality of the products, energy consumption, and environmental concern have become significant challenges for supply chain managers. Also, smart devices are essential for daily life in the current socioeconomic environment, and customers primarily contemplate a smart product’s price and energy usage before purchasing that. In this situation, to maintain a balance between the selling price, energy consumption, and carbon emission from supply chain operations becomes necessary. So this study develops a twoechelon sustainable inventory model for deteriorating items with an imperfect production process under energy consumption and selling price dependent demand. The producer makes a rework process and quality improvement investment to mitigate defective products and enhance the quality of the products. The present model develops under the influence of inflation. Also, preservation and green technologies are used to mitigate the rate of deterioration and carbon emission, respectively. Firstly, the model is created in a crisp sense, and then expanded into a fuzzy learning model to examine the impact of the learning effect in an imprecise environment. A numerical analysis is performed to validate the proposed model, and the cost function’s convexity is shown graphically using mathematica software. The result of the proposed model provides significant insights to decision-makers on how to efficiently reduce waste while still minimizing the total cost of the system by investing in high efficiency preservation, quality improvement and green techniques. Also, due to learning in fuzziness, the fuzzy learning model gives the lowest total cost, followed by the fuzzy and crisp model. Finally, for various parameters, a sensitivity analysis is performed to gather valuable observations and management insights.