This seminar will take place on June 7 at 15:00. The seminar will be in a hybrid format with:
- in-person session in the IST Alameda Campus, Department of Engineering and Management's Meeting Room
- online, via Zoom https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/91803726692
Our seminars are free to attend and open to everyone. Please share with whomever may be interested.
Summary
Driven by due diligence requirements, social sustainability aspects receive more attention in global supply chains. In the automotive industry, e.g., companies search for sustainable supply sources, engage in supplier development, or invest in raw material mining projects to meet social standards. In current research on strategic network planning, however, social sustainability is rarely studied, and often approached in a simplified manner. To address this gap, we develop a novel network planning approach that combines social life cycle assessment, activity analysis, and mixed-integer linear programming. The model particularly decides how much raw material to source from multiple sites, which may operate at different levels of costs and social risks. To meet certain social standards and fulfill demand, different measures are available: commitment to long-term contracts with suppliers, investment in mining projects, and implementation of social development measures. The costs associated with these decisions are minimized in an economic objective function, while social risk is limited by additional constraints. The approach is applied to raw material extraction in the supply chain of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. The analyses show the trade-offs between the sourcing decisions to meet social standards. In cobalt mining, e.g., investing in mining projects in Australia can reduce the social risks associated with sourcing cobalt from long-term contracts in the Congo.
Speaker's bio
Lea Franze is a research assistant and 3rd year PhD student at the Chair of Production and Logistics Management at FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany. Under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Karsten Kieckhäfer, she is working on social sustainability in supply chains, especially for raw materials used in electric vehicles. During her bachelor and master studies, she focused on Operations Research methods to solve complex network or location problems. During her PhD studies, she is combining these OR methods with Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) to also consider social aspects of sustainability in network planning. She is currently staying at Instituto Superior Técnico with Profs. Bruna Mota and Ana Póvoa. The goal of this collaboration is to deepen the understanding of competing objectives in the selection of raw material suppliers for electric vehicles.
Personal homepage: https://www.fernuni-hagen.de/produktion-logistik/team/lea.franze.shtml