An efficient Lagrangian-based heuristic to solve a multi-objective sustainable supply chain problem

Sustainable Supply Chain (SSC) management aims at integrating economic, environmental and social goals to assist in the long-term planning of a company and its supply chains. There is no consensus in the literature as to whether social and environmental responsibilities are profit-compatible. However, the conflicting nature of these goals is explicit when considering specific assessment measures and, in this scenario, multi-objective optimization is a way to represent problems that simultaneously optimize the goals. This paper proposes a Lagrangian matheuristic method, called AugMathLagr, to solve a hard and relevant multi-objective problem found in the literature. AugMathLagr was extensively tested using artificial instances defined by a generator presented in this paper. The results show a competitive performance of AugMathLagr when compared with an exact multi-objective method limited by time and a matheuristic recently proposed in the literature and adapted here to address the studied problem. In addition, computational results on a case study are presented and analyzed, and demonstrate the outstanding performance of AugMathLagr.