Increasing food supply chain sustainability means having to deal with many conflicting aspects and involves producers, several departments in distribution companies, and consumers. The objectives of this research are to develop models to solve real-world supplier evaluation problems and validate them with real data on fresh fruits in a supermarket chain. Literature review and results from a survey with managers from purchasing, logistics, and quality departments of a food distribution company are used to establish criteria, to first model the assessment of products and, second, to model supplier evaluation. A multicriteria hybrid approach is proposed, using multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT) to assess the quality of products and Preference Ranking Organisation Method for Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE) to complete their evaluation with strategic criteria to be included in the second phase. The results allow companies to rank suppliers by product and classify them according to the main criteria categories, such as product strategy, food safety, economic, logistic, commercial, green image and corporate social responsibility. A sorting approach is also applied to obtain ordered groups of suppliers. Finally, the models proposed can form the core of a decision support system in order to create and monitor the supplier base in food distribution companies, as well as to inform sustainable decision making.

Supplier evaluation is a relevant task of supply chain management where multicriteria methods make great contributions to manufacturing industries. This is not the case in food distribution companies, which have a key role in providing safe and affordable food to society. The purpose of this research is to measure the sustainability of products and suppliers in food distribution companies through a multiple criteria approach. Firstly, the system proposed provides indicators to qualify products and assess the food quality, using the compensatory Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT) model. Secondly, these indicators are included in supplier evaluation, which takes economic, environmental, and social criteria into account. MAUT and Preference Ranking Organisation Method for Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE), a non-compensatory method, are used for supplier evaluation. This approach has been validated for fresh food in a supermarket chain, mainly using historical data. Partial indicators, such as food safety scores, together with global indicators of suppliers, inform the most appropriate decisions and the most appropriate relations between companies and providers. Poor performance in food safety can lead to the disqualification of some suppliers. MAUT is good for qualifying products and is easy to apply at the operational level in logistic platforms, while PROMETHEE is more suitable for supplier segmentation, as it helps to identify supplier strengths and weaknesses.

Aim of study: There is a lack of empirical research that deals with sustainable forest management in Mediterranean regions, among the most vulnerable ecosystems. The main purpose of this work is to define the strategic criteria and objectives for sustainable forest management and aggregate the preferences of stakeholders in a Mediterranean region, using AHP and Goal Programming.Area of study: Valencian Community (Spain).Material and Methods: Firstly, we identified forest stakeholders and structured a decision hierarchy. Then a workshop was carried out to test and validate the proposed criteria and objectives, as well as a survey to determine social preferences. Secondly, another survey was conducted amongst experts to prioritize action plans.Main results: Stakeholders’ preferences gave the greatest importance to the environmental criteria (hydrological regulation and erosion, climate change mitigation and biodiversity) with an average weight of 40%. Social criteria (employment, recreational activities and landscape) had a weight of 38% and 22% the economic criteria case (wood, hunting and fishing, livestock, renewable energies, rural tourism and mining). The results showed that new products and services such as tourism, renewable energies, landscape, hydrological regulation and erosion control, biodiversity or climate change mitigation are very relevant objectives. We also prioritized action plans comparing them with the distribution of the administration budget.Research highlights: The environmental and social criteria are much more important than the economic ones in the regional planning of the Mediterranean forest, regardless of the method used to aggregate the social preferences and if the forest is public or private.Key words: Multiple Criteria Decision Making; Goal Programming; Analytic Hierarchy Process; Preferences Aggregation.

Purpose: Seeks to focus on operations priority patterns and operations strategy. Configurations by testing them in a specific environment which contributes to demonstrating their applicability and generalizability.Design/methodology/approach: Using data from 130 Spanish companies with project process organization, their operations strategy is analyzed as a whole, without the following of a trade‐off pattern being observed.Findings: Cost, conformer and innovation strategy types, compared with other operations strategy configurations regarding variables used to develop project management configurations, for the most part exhibit a coherent behaviour, giving support to operations strategy validation at a higher theoretical level.Research limitations/implications: The two most important limitations are the relatively small sample size used in the study and the results obtained with the organization structure variable. Similar studies in other specific production process contexts should also be undertaken.Practical implications: Results obtained contribute to demonstrating the applicability of the operations strategy framework to the study of operations management in different environments and its coherence with the specific variables that are used to characterize them.Originality/value: This study is virtually breaking new ground, prompted by recent calls for empirical research and for testing developed theories on operations management.

This paper examines key aspects of the behavior of housing demand from a sustainable standpoint. Most studies have mainly focused on housing supply, looking at quantitative predictions without considering the qualitative relationship found between housing values and housing demand on a sustainable and microeconomic scale. We used a multicriteria decision methodology (analytic hierarchy process—AHP) for the analysis of preferences in demand, based on the theory of multi-attribute utility of housing, to determine the relative importance of each characteristic of housing and its influence on the decision-making process. For this purpose, we carried out the study over three main groups of stakeholders in the housing market: real estate surveyors, real estate agents, and housing buyers (the latter representing the housing demand). Results show that although there might be some slight discrepancies among the three groups in the decision-making process and the weighting of housing attributes, the three groups agree in most of the process, especially when defining the criteria and the importance that each criterion has on the process of valuation. This study provides important managerial and sustainable implications for the real estate market related to urban public policy, as we highlight which criteria are most preferred.