A coupled evaluation and optimization approach to drive product variety towards sustainability
Abstract
Increasing customer demands for highly personalized and environmentally friendly products urge companies to
find new ways for managing their production systems. The aim is to cope with diversity of items while
delivering profitable products with lower environmental impact. This paper proposes a coupled evaluation and
optimization approach to steer product variety towards environmental and economic sustainability. A predefined
set of indicators enriched with weights given by the user ensures the evaluation, while optimization uses linear
programming. The paper highlights the impact of variety steering on environmental and economic sustainability
indicators. Additionally, the paper underlines the need to translate regulations into concrete company goals
through integrating carbon markets into the proposed model.