Evaluation of adaptation strategies for sustainable supply chains: application in medical waste reverse supply chains

Integrating sustainability and resilience, supply chain (SC) viability exhibits excellent capabilities to withstand unforeseen and uncontrollable disruption events and aid SCs in recovering from the long-term impacts of disruptions. To enhance the SC viability, decision-makers need to carefully assess the performance of adaptation strategies (e.g., intertwining, scalability, substitution, and repurposing). SC sustainability, a critical facet of viability, encompasses the interconnected domains of the environment, society, and economy. Thus, evaluating adaptation strategies, particularly for sustainable SCs, is of utmost importance. Recently, Ivanov (Int J Prod Res 59(12)3535-3552, 2021) assesses the performance (i.e., recovery time) for adaptation strategies, assuming that the recovery rate is a constant. In practice, however, the recovery rate is usually uncertain and may change over time. Besides, the SC decision-makers possess different risk attitudes. Therefore, this study generalizes Ivanov (Int J Prod Res 59(12)3535-3552, 2021)'s method by integrating the uncertain recovery rate and risk attitudes of SC managers. This research aims to assist decision-makers for evaluating adaptation strategies for sustainable SCs. To this end, this paper establishes a risk-averse and a robust evaluation methods, where the risk-averse method covers different risk tolerances and the robust method considers the worst-case scenario. By applying the methods to the medical waste reverse SC in China, we find that the assessed recovery time depends significantly on the mean value of the uncertain recovery rate for SC managers with various risk attitudes. Besides, for the manager who values the worst case, this study suggests that the larger the standard deviation of uncertain recovery rate is, the larger recovery time is estimated. The findings may help decision-makers adjust adaptation strategies based on the evaluated recovery time.