A novel collaborative framework for multi-objective coordination in sustainable supply chains: integrating government environmental legislation

Advancing sustainable supply chains within a multi-objective framework has been the focus of considerable recent research. However, the issue of supply chain coordination remains largely unexplored in this context. This paper develops a multi-objective bi-level closed-loop supply chain coordination model that incorporates transportation mode selection, categorizing vehicles into economic and green modes. The proposed model is analyzed under four scenarios: centralized, decentralized, economic collaboration, and sustainable collaboration. In alignment with government environmental legislation, the final setting is developed based on the cap-and-trade policy framework. Additionally, a fuzzy membership-based aggregation approach is employed to address multiple objective functions. To evaluate the model’s effectiveness, several test problems are conducted to numerically assess the performance of different scenarios and their alignment with sustainability goals. The results indicate that, beyond providing a Pareto improvement for both channel members, the economic collaboration plan can yield the optimal solution for the integrated system. Moreover, the sustainable collaborative strategy effectively minimizes environmental and social impacts while enhancing supply chain profitability.