Sustainable food waste supply chain network design problem with government environmental oversight: Globalized robust bi-level model and exact algorithm

Abstract

In the context of circular economy, governments and stakeholders are increasingly concerned about the sustainable development of food waste utilization. Due to the social value and economic significance of food waste recovery system, an examination is conducted on a sustainable food waste supply chain (SFWSC) with government environmental oversight. Under the uncertain amount of food waste collected daily, a novel globalized robust bi-level programming model with government oversight is proposed to optimize the reuse of food waste to minimize total costs and negative environmental impacts such as CO₂ and CH₄. The characterization of the uncertainty of food waste involves a pair of inner and outer uncertainty sets. Based on strong duality theory, the globalized robust bi-level optimization model can be transformed into a computationally tractable mixed integer programming model. To improve solution efficiency and quality, this paper employs the Benders decomposition (BD) algorithm with two accelerated strategies to solve the equivalent model. Lastly, a large-scale case study of food waste management in Shandong Province, China, is carried out to showcase the applicability of the proposed model and algorithm. The results indicate that food waste companies can reduce total costs without increasing environmental impacts under government environmental oversight.