A distributed and collaborative model for product design selection considering its supply chain costs and environmental footprint

We study the problem of the simultaneous design of a product and its supply chain. A distributed model optimising costs and environmental footprint is presented. We develop a multi-agent system assuring the collaboration of different actors. Explicitly, first, we develop a two-stage process combining multi-criteria decision method and integer linear programming models to assist agents for decisions. Second, we present roles and communication flow between agents. Finally, two applications, for an industrial case study showing the feasibility of the proposed system, are presented.