This article presents an overview of the models applied to sustainable inventory management in supply chains and a roadmap for new research. It aims to address the lack of understanding of how sustainability is being incorporated into quantitative inventory management models in the supply chain context. The study is based on a classification of the reviewed literature according to the following criteria: supply chain structure, environmental approach, problem type, modeling, and solution approach. As a result, 36 articles were analyzed and classified. The main findings show that studies that incorporate social sustainability into inventory management along supply chains are lacking, while environmental studies are a growing research area. Uncertainty issues also need to be incorporated into sustainable inventory management models. Another important result of this study is the definition of a roadmap with trends and future research guidelines. The identified future research guidelines include incorporating decisions that can help to improve economic, environmental, and social sustainability. Thus, future studies should focus on both following quantitative models that incorporate inventory decisions integrally with transportation and location decisions, and more complex models, and employing new algorithms and heuristics to solve them.

Operations management researchers and practitioners have shown increasing interest in incorporating sustainability into supply chain (SC) design models. This means that sustainability must be considered in all aspects of the SC, including location, inventory and transportation (LIT) decisions. Hence the aim of this article is to propose an optimisation model that incorporates: (i) LIT decisions in an integrated manner; (ii) the three sustainability (3S) aspects, i.e. economic, environmental and social, into each named decisions; and (iii) a closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) structure. The proposed formulation is a multi-objective mixed integer non-linear programming (MO-MINLP) model whose objectives consider minimisation of economic and social costs (economic aspect) and carbon emissions (environmental aspect), and maximisation of the social impact of SC operations (social aspect). A transformation technique is applied to one of the objective functions, which results in an MO-MILP model solved by the lexicographic method. This article focuses on commodity industries where only one finished product is manufactured. Hence the 3S-LIT model is validated with a randomly generated dataset and against a recently published alternative model applied to the copper mining industry.

Supplier selection plays a pivotal role in the mining industry, forming a key component of the supply chain management. It has been established that the integration of sustainability and resilience into this process can significantly enhance the industry’s ability to withstand economic, environmental, and social shocks. Despite a large body of literature investigating supplier selection, there is a notable gap in research specifically addressing the incorporation of sustainability and resilience criteria in the mining industry. The objective of this research is to bridge this knowledge gap and contribute to the understanding of sustainable and resilient supplier selection in the mining industry. A constructive research approach was employed, identifying both practical and theoretical problems and proposing a construction—a mathematical model. This model was developed in collaboration with industry key actors, ensuring its practical applicability and validity. The main result of this research is an optimization mathematical programming model that allows practitioners to evaluate and select suppliers considering both sustainability and resilience criteria. The model facilitates a comprehensive assessment of suppliers, incorporating a wide range of factors beyond cost, including environmental impact, social responsibility, and the ability to maintain supply under various potential disruptions.

Sustainability in supply chains (SC) is a topic that has been widely discussed recently and, similarly to the quest to develop green SCs, it does not contemplate the integration of economic and social dimensions of sustainable SC management (SSCM). This article proposes a conceptual framework to provide key factors that act as a valuable tool to further develop quantitative models of location, inventory and transportation (LIT) problems in SSCs. The objectives of this paper are to: (i) review the literature by focusing on conceptual frameworks for sustainable SC; (ii) map and construct the conceptual framework blocks by describing each element and dimension; and (iii) validate the conceptual framework. The conceptual framework comprises five main blocks: SC structures, sustainable inputs, quantitative models, inventory policies and sustainability objectives. These five blocks are then formed by different dimensions and elements, which are described in this paper and validated in a mining case study. The results show that no previous studies propose a reference conceptual framework to model a sustainable LIT problem in a CLSC context, which is the main novelty of this paper. Finally, the conceptual framework is validated and applied as a diagnostic tool in two copper mining companies.

El objetivo del artículo es investigar sobre la incidencia de las variables que componen el Capital Intelectual en el rendimiento financiero de las Instituciones de Educación Superior, específicamente en las universidades de Chile. Fueron investigadas cincuenta y siete universidades entre públicas y privadas, de las cuales se obtuvo ratios financieros y las dimensiones de Capital Intelectual, es decir, Capital Humano, Estructural y Relacional. Los resultados obtenidos apoyan parcialmente las hipótesis planteadas las cuales indican que el Capital Humano, Relacional y Estructural contribuyen al desempeño financiero que tienen las Universidades.