Modelling, designing and PEST analysis implementation of a porcine products supply chain: a metaheuristics approached solved case study

There is evidence that supply chain design plays a critical role in the development of competitiveness among companies and industries. Furthermore, the new trends and purchasing behavior exhibited by customers call for the improvement of the supply chain’s performance and mitigation of negative environmental impacts, resulting in the design of varied supply chains, including closed-loop supply chains as they comprise forward and backward flow of products, information, and finance. In this paper, a porcine closed-loop supply chain design for pig and porcine products is proposed due to pig meat and pork products importance thanks to their nutritional value among other agri-food products. Hereby, a multi-period, multi-product linear mathematical model is developed to explain the behavior and minimize the net present value as well as the total cost of the proposed network. To give solution to the model, a set of metaheuristics is used, comprising single-solution, population-based and hybrid algorithms. In addition, a set of 15 trial cases is formed to validate the model. Furthermore, a case study is built for the determination of the parameters to feed the model. The study’s results are compared through the mean relative percentage deviation and convergence curves. According to the results, all used metaheuristics can provide solutions to the proposed model and network, but the metaheuristic H_KASA outperforms all the others in terms of objective function quality values and number of iterations. Finally, managerial insights regarding transportation cost, inventory cost, production capacity and demand are developed.