A Coevolution Approach for the Multi-objective Circular Supply Chain Problem

As a more sustainable resource use is becoming of greater concern, moving towards a more circular economy seems promising. However, compared to the traditional, mostly linear production processes, this introduces new challenges, as reintroducing recycled materials into production also increases supply chain complexity and therefore cost. The circular supply chain (CSC) problem is modeling these challenges to find good tradeoff solutions between profitability and sustainable resource use. The optimization concerns the production planning and material sourcing of a production plant. This is a complex task due to their inherent dependencies. In this paper, we use a cooperative coevolutionary approach to optimize the CSC problem, by decomposing it to resolve the variable dependencies. Besides presenting the algorithm, a proof of concept evaluation is done to show its feasibility.