This seminar will take place on June 17 at 14:30. 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://zoom.us/j/91523103687?pwd=lZq2lLm68Rojp5KbvGcAuGU0KafZkk.1
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 has been receiving more attention in electric vehicle battery supply chains. Critical raw materials like cobalt and lithium, essential for battery production, carry significant social risks. Automotive companies address these risks by seeking sustainable supply sources, investing in sustainable mining projects, recycling batteries to recover raw materials, or engaging in sustainable supplier development. Additionally, the demand for batteries will increase in the coming years, resulting in the need for capacity adjustments at existing and potential new production facilities, as well as presenting a higher complexity in distribution planning. Although social sustainability in supply chains is receiving more attention from real world practitioners, it is rarely studied in existing supply chain planning literature and often approached simplistically. To address this gap, we develop a novel optimization model that integrates decisions related to procurement strategies (e.g., supplier selection, supplier development, and raw material sourcing), location and capacity planning, and distribution planning. Combining social life cycle assessment, activity analysis, and multi-objective optimization, our model determines optimal raw material sourcing strategies from multiple sites with varying costs and social risks for multiple periods, evaluates where to implement supplier development measures to improve social risks, and decides on capacity adjustments as well as the distribution structure between production facilities and customers. The net present value of these decisions is maximized in the economic objective function, while social risks (e.g., risk of child labor) are either limited by constraints or used as a second objective function. In a numerical experiment, we analyze how different objective functions impact sourcing strategies, the implementation of supplier development measures as well as location, capacity, and distribution decisions. We address questions such as: When is it economically beneficial to source from suppliers with high social risks and when to implement supplier development measures? When are investments in recycling plants economically and socially beneficial? When and where are capacity adjustments or facility openings necessary? And which production facility should supply which customers?
Speaker's bio
Lea Franze is a research assistant and fifth-year Ph.D. student at the Chair of Production and Logistics Management at FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany. Under Prof. Dr. Karsten Kieckhäfer's supervision, she is researching social sustainability in supply chains, particularly with regard to the raw materials used in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. During her bachelor's and master's studies, she focused on operations research methods to solve complex network and location problems. For her Ph.D., she is combining these OR methods with social life cycle assessment (SLCA) to consider the social aspects of sustainability in network planning. She is currently visiting the Instituto Superior Técnico with Professors Ana Póvoa and Bruna Mota. This collaboration aims to improve understanding of the competing objectives involved in selecting raw material suppliers for lithium-ion batteries, as well as in making decisions regarding supplier development measures, facility locations, and distribution planning.
Personal homepage: https://www.fernuni-hagen.de/produktion-logistik/team/lea.franze.shtml